Daniel Levine, fourth-generation owner of Manhattan's J. Levine Books and Judaica, says that while online booksellers such as Amazon hurt his business a decade ago, now he's been able to use the Web to boost his sales. (Alexandra Halpern)

NEW YORK (JTA) – The books are in the back at J. Levine Books and Judaica.

Before finding the volumes of Jewish titles at the midtown Manhattan store, customers encounter a rotating display of mezuzahs on the left, followed by shelves of kiddush cups and a rack featuring a Hebrew-language version of the wordplay game Bananagrams. Sitting on the colorful shelves to the right are kippot, tallitot and assorted Jewish toys.

Finally, one reaches the tractates of Talmud, prayer books, commentaries and modern Jewish novels. Due to the space taken by the other items, some of the titles that once adorned the shelves are now stored in the back room.

Like many traditional bookstores, J. Levine is wrestling with an adapt-or-die reality as it competes with online mega-booksellers such as Amazon. The brick-and-mortar shops have developed a variety of strategies to stay profitable and deal with declining book sales.

Some, such as J. Levine, have had some success in turning around losses. A number are beginning to rely more on Judaica than the once primary staple of  books as they seek to maintain a steady stream of loyal, local customers.

“At the beginning it was a disaster,” said Daniel Levine, the fourth-generation owner of J. Levine. “Now the Internet is only helping us. All of our new business comes just from Google. It has helped us remain a player in the book world.”

Levine said his business dropped 18 percent from 2000 to 2005 as customers moved to Amazon. But since then the store’s sales have risen 20 percent, as Levine acclimated to the new environment of online commerce. As more people began using Google to find bookstores, the mid-Manhattan location helped increase the traffic to J. Levine.

Aside from the increased traffic to the store’s website, Levine attributes the rise in business to a growing emphasis on selling Judaica. He says that ketubahs, tallitot, kiddush cups and the like sell at a higher profit margin than Bibles or the latest book on Israel.

Not everyone is as fortunate.

For Rosenblum’s World of Judaica in Skokie, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, focusing on Judaica has not offset deep cuts necessitated by the recent economic downturn. In 2005 the store had nine employees; today it has five. Likewise, Rosenblum’s has cut much of its advertising budget in recent years, said owner Avi Fox.

“We can’t buy books for the prices Amazon is selling them,” he said.

But he is more concerned about competition from Jewish book publishers such as the Orthodox ArtScroll Mesorah Publications. ArtScroll sells books wholesale to Jewish bookstores as well as directly from its website, offering discounts up to 30 percent and free shipping.

ArtScroll’s management says that by showcasing its offerings in catalogues and online, the company is actually supporting retail stores in Jewish population centers. Its co-founder, Rabbi Meir Zlotowitz, says ArtScroll offers steep discounts to its retailers and that “bookstores can always give a better price than we do.”

Another strategy is employed by the Boston area’s Israel Book Shop, which is offsetting a drop in sales through an affiliation with its own Jewish publisher, Israel Book Shop Publications in Lakewood, N.J. The two businesses are separate, but the store promotes the publisher on its website, and the publisher offers discounts to the store.

Israel Book Shop’s owner, Chaim Dovek, calls having the brick-and-mortar store a “huge advantage” because it allows him to store inventory for the website and serves as a spot for customers to “socialize and browse.” In fact, he says the majority of the shop’s sales come from the store and not from its website.

These owners also compete with Amazon through their own websites, but some of those efforts fall short.

West Side Judaica, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, caters to a cross-section of the Jewish community. It aims to stay afloat the old-fashioned way — by relying on local customers and endorsements from local synagogues. The store shut down its website because it wasn’t sufficiently profitable. Owner Yakov Salczer says the store’s sales have declined 30 percent during the past five years. But he has not lost hope in spite of the tough climate.

“Hashem has a plan,” Salczer said. “Customers come to me because they want to support me. The only reason I’m still in business is because I have local customers supporting me [and] support from the local synagogue.”

But according to the director of the Jewish Book Council, Carolyn Hessel, today’s bookstores will survive in the future only by investing in online commerce.

“They have to turn toward the online presence,” Hessel said. “I don’t think the brick-and-mortar store is as important. As the generation that grew up with the brick-and-mortar store dies out, you’re going to see less and less brick-and-mortar stores.”

During the past few decades, Manhattan has seen a sharp decline in the number of Jewish bookstores. Levine noted that at least four local Judaica stores have closed since the 1990s. Before World War II, he said, there were dozens of such stores in Jewish neighborhoods like the Lower East Side. Now only two remain: his and West Side Judaica.

Levine, however, hopes the reputation afforded by his 120-year-old shop’s history will help keep it alive for generations to come. Although he sees the value of buying Judaica on the Internet, he still thinks customers will continue to appreciate the advantages of a traditional Jewish bookstore.

“Can you see the ketubah you’re buying online?” he said. “How can you figure out what the real color is, what the feel is? How can you feel a tallis made out of silk? Are these the types of things that people are going to give up forever? I don’t think people will really do that.”

Some 40,000 haredi Orthodox men filled Citi Field in New York to rally against the dangers of the Internet, May 20, 2012. (Ben Sales)

NEW YORK (JTA) — The sellout crowd that filled Citi Field on Sunday night wore black and white, not the New York Mets’ blue and orange.

And instead of jeering the Philadelphia Phillies or Atlanta Braves, they faced a foe that was, to hear them talk about it, far more formidable: the World Wide Web.

“The Internet even with a filter is a minefield of immorality,” said Rabbi Ephraim Wachsman, a haredi Orthodox lecturer. “This issue is the test of the generation. Your strength at this gathering will determine what Judaism will look like a few years from now.”

The rally to caution haredi Orthodox Jews about the dangers of the Internet drew a crowd of more than 40,000 men to the stadium, most of them wearing black hats. The group organizing the rally, Ichud HaKehillos LeTohar HaMachane, or Union of Communities for Purity of the Camp, barred women from attending — consummate with the haredi practice of separating the sexes.

In Yiddish and English speeches, rabbis from haredi communities in the United States, Canada and Israel decried the access that the Internet gives haredim to the world outside their community. Speakers called the Internet “impure,” a threat to modesty and compared it to chametz, or leavened bread, on Passover.

Almost no rabbi directly addressed pornography, which is prohibited by traditional Jewish law. Several speakers also lamented the Internet’s potential to distract men from learning Torah.

To a man, each of the rabbis who spoke said that Jewish law forbids Jews from browsing the Internet without a filter that blocks inappropriate sites. The speeches in Yiddish were broadcast with English subtitles on the stadium’s JumboTron.

Rabbi Yechiel Meir Katz, known as the Dzibo rav, compared the threat of the Internet to the dangers that Zionism and the European Enlightenment posed in the past to traditional Jewish life.

“A terrible test has been sent to us that has inflicted so much terrible damage” on haredim, Katz said. The Internet poses a greater threat to haredim than secularism did, he said, because “in previous challenges we knew who the enemy was. Today, however, the challenge is disguised and not discernible to the naked eye.”

The crowd ranged in age from small children to senior citizens. One participant, Yitzchak Weinberger, said that although the speakers focused on the Internet problem rather than solutions, the event was “inspiring.”

“This is a beginning,” said Weinberger, 43. “They’re coming to raise awareness. Every situation is different, everyone requires some filter.”

While haredim must limit their internet access, “you can’t not use it,” he added.

About 50 people protested the event across the street from the stadium. Many of the protesters came from Footsteps, a local organization that helps those who leave haredi Orthodox life integrate into non-haredi society. In particular, they complained that Ichud HaKehillos invested money in the rally rather than in preventing child molestation in the haredi community.

“Their priorities are messed up,” said Ari Mandel, a former haredi. “Not only do they ignore child molestation, but they intimidate victims. If your house is on fire, you don’t worry about leaking pipes.”

The rally came after a series of reports in The New York Jewish Week, the Forward and The New York Times about haredi intimidation of victims of sexual abuse who have gone to the police to report their haredi tormentors.

“Matzah ball soup or a nice deli sandwich. And of course in the winter, latkes warm you up. I’m sure I’ll eat a lot of everything once the season starts,” Schwartz said from his hometown of Los Angeles as he rattled off some of his favorite Jewish comfort foods.

The Browns hope the 22-year-old right tackle from the University of California Berkeley will shore up the right side of the offensive line, an area of concern after a disappointing 4-12 season last year.

When Schwartz’s cell phone rang during the second day of the draft on April 27, he said emotions in his house ran pretty high.

“Whenever you get that call you’re not quite sure that it’s going to be ‘the’ call,” he said. “But I picked up the phone and heard the good news. My family reacted a little more intensely than I did. They were jumping on the couch and running around a little. It was awesome.”

Schwartz said he and his brother Geoff, a member of the Minnesota Vikings, were raised in a strong Jewish household.

“We’ve always been in Hebrew school from an early age,” said Schwartz, whose family belonged to Conservative synagogue Adat Shalom in West Los Angeles “We went to temple every year, observed major holidays. We were pretty active, especially compared to some of the friends we had who were Jewish.”

Schwartz followed a similar path to the NFL as his brother, who was drafted by the Carolina Panthers in the seventh round (241st overall) in the 2008 NFL Draft. Geoff signed a one-year deal with the Vikings on March 31.

Schwartz’s father Lee said that he and his wife Olivia Goodkin feel lucky to have two sons in the NFL.

“I guess the best way to say it is, it’s surreal,” he said. “I kvell (take pleasure) when thinking about it. For a dad who’s been a jock his whole life, it’s a real unbelievable situation.

“We stressed family, we stressed being good, ethical people, morals,” Lee Schwartz said of raising his sons. “We stressed the religion and being Jewish. I think it’s just a collection of a lot of things that we as parents try to instill in them, and ultimately it worked out.

Schwartz said he’s looking forward to getting involved in Cleveland’s Jewish community.

“From everything I’ve heard, it sounds like a pretty decent-sized community in Cleveland,” he said. “I’m sure my mom and dad will help me figure it out. I’m plenty confident I’ll be able to find something.”

As for joining a synagogue, Schwartz said he’d play it by ear.

“You kind of have to figure that out as you go,” he said. “Especially during the season, it’s a lot harder to find time for that.”

While he paves the way for the Browns’ running backs and protects the quarterback this season, Schwartz said he won’t forget the influence Judaism has had on his athletic career.

“Judaism teaches a lot of dedication and hard work,” he said. “You don’t go back on your word. You do what you’re supposed to do when you’re told by your superior. I think it’s more the spirit of being a good person in society. If you do those things the right way, you’ll be successful no matter what you do.”

The event’s box office has an email address. Speeches will be live streamed. And one of the event’s organizers owns a Web marketing company specializing in search engine optimization.

This isn’t your average anti-Internet demonstration.

After years of oft-flouted rabbinic bans on Internet use, a group of both Chasidic and non-Chasidic rabbis is pushing a new approach that will be unveiled at the Mets’ CitiField on May 20. Organizers project an attendance of some 40,000 Orthodox Jewish men; women were not invited.

http://forward.com/articles/156102/orthodox-rally-for-a-more-kosher-internet/?p=2

“How remarkable!” I will say with (feigned) enthusiasm. But to her it is remarkable; she had never noticed it before.

When I hear the phrase from Pirkei Avot (the Teachings of our Fathers), “Turn it around and around, for everything is in it” (5:21), the image of a toy jumps to my mind.

The rabbis of the Mishnah, however, were writing at the beginning of the Common Era in the Land of Israel and not in 21st century playrooms of North America, so I’m not sure they share the same association. Surely they were referring to the Torah and the revered text’s limitless insights and wisdom.

There is, however, something playful about the phrase. If we studied the Torah the way a child plays with a toy — repeatedly and open to the possibility of discovering something remarkable — then perhaps we would discover something remarkable.

Why should we make this ancient scroll our own? For starters, the Torah tells us we should.

In recounting the story when the Torah was revealed to Moses, the text begins by describing the journey of the Israelites to Mount Sinai.

“In the third month after the children of Israel went out of the land of Egypt, the same day ['bayom hazeh'] they came into the wilderness of Sinai,” it says in Exodus 19:1. If the Torah were retelling something that already took place, it should say “on that day” not on “this day.” Rashi, the 12th century French commentator, says we should look to the Torah as if it is being given on this day. The Torah is being given, and revelation has the potential to happen anew each day.

Nice words, but how might we really experience this? While Shavuot offers us a moment to focus our attention on Torah study — all-night learning tikkun style awaits at many area synagogues and JCCs — the esoteric musings of a Talmud scholar at 3 a.m. may not be the kind of revelation we seek.

Try this activity (which I learned from dear friends Rabbi David Ingber and Ariel Rosen.) It’s called “Find your (Uni) Verse.” Here’s what you do:

Step 1: Open the Torah (the scroll, book or even an online version).

Step 2: Randomly point to a verse (this may be easier with a book version).

Step 3: Read the verse a couple of times. The first time is to understand the plain meaning. The second and third times are to play with different interpretations of what the verse might be saying. Consult commentary on the verse if you like.

Step 4: Consider the lesson that you might learn from this verse. What wisdom might it impart?

Step 5: Try to apply the lesson to your life in the coming weeks.

Some Torah verses may have immediate relevance to you than others. “Honor your father and mother” and “Love your Neighbor as Yourself” may be clear at face value and easy to apply. Other verses from Leviticus, like ones that speak about people stricken with tzara’at, may take a bit more parsing. (Luckily, commentators understood tzara’at as “motzi shem ra,” one who does not speak truthfully about another person, an aspect of gossip to which we may relate more readily.)

Even (or especially) if you don’t think the verse relates to you on face value, sit with it for a while. I promise, you will find some meaning.

My husband and I did this activity last year with our community. We just had a disagreement about some household matter and were a little tense going into the holiday. The verse he selected was “Together with your households, you shall feast there before the Lord your God” (Deuteronomy 12:7).

The lesson was clear: Don’t let the everyday stresses of your life cloud the experience of these precious holidays. Safeguard them, honor them. You can get back to your stress when the holiday is over, but for now, let it go and rejoice!

How a verse selected at random can be personally relevant speaks to the power of the Torah and the potential for its wisdom to be revealed to us.

“Your Testimonies are my delight/play thing, they are my counselors,” it says in Psalms 119:24. On Shavuot, turn your selected phrases of the Torah around and around in your mind. The words will become for you a beloved toy.

That’s a local legend.

Pilgrims enjoying the Hiloula celebration at the El Ghriba Synagogue in Tunisia, May 2012.

Another is that the miracle worker is buried beneath the foundation stone of the El Ghriba Synagogue, one of the oldest continuously used synagogues in the Diaspora and the site of an annual pilgrimage that typically brings thousands to Djerba seeking answers to their prayers.

This year, amid political uncertainty and security concerns, the two-day celebration held last week on Lag b’Omer drew more journalists and police than pilgrims.

“We have about 300 people here from abroad today, but most are locals,” said Rene Trabelsi, a Paris-based organizer of the celebration whose family oversees the synagogue. “What’s important is that we are having this event this year because last year it did not happen. I hope we can slowly increase the number of people attending each year.”

Last year, in the aftermath of Tunisia’s revolution that overthrew the country’s long time autocrat Zine El Abddine Ben Ali and killed more than 300 Tunisians, the celebration was canceled.

Pilgrimages in previous years had attracted thousands of visitors to Djerba. After the El Ghriba Synagogue was attacked in 2002, the pilgrimage was vastly scaled back, but the number of pilgrims steadily increased until nearly 10,000 came in 2010.

Heavy security accompanied this year’s event, and those coming by car faced some dozen checkpoints en route.

Elias al-Fakhfakh, Tunisia’s minister of tourism and a member of the center-left Ettakatol political party, attended on the second day.

The crowd, which had been singing kabbalistic tunes outside the synagogue, switched to the Tunisian national anthem as al-Fakhfakh approached.

Entering the El Ghriba sanctuary, al-Fakhfakh put on a kabbus, a red traditional Tunisian hat that many Tunisian Jewish men wear as a kippah.

Before cameras from almost every Tunisian television station, al-Fakhfakh viewed both the sefer Torah and holy area where the foundation stone is believed to be.

“It is great that Muslims and Jews can celebrate this occasion together,” he told a cheering crowd before heading off to a meal with local Jewish community leaders. “After the Tunisian revolution we adopted new democratic values. We have a new country with a deep heritage that accepts people with different cultures and religions.

“As a government,” he said, “we want to embrace good relations between Jews and Muslims in the new free Tunisia.”

During the pilgrimage, El Ghriba’s sanctuary becomes a holding place for people’s wishes, which are written on paper and placed inside cracks of the wall — similar to the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Coins are placed inside oil lamps for tzedakah,

charity.

Women seeking to marry or have children visit El Ghriba and write their wishes on boiled eggs, symbolizing life. Candles are lit for those asking for good health and a long life.

A door to the foundation stone, which is beneath the ark, is opened during the pilgrimage, so the candles and eggs may be placed on the stone.

Newlywed Vanessa Mamou, whose father is from Djerba, traveled from Paris for the celebration.

“I put an egg in the synagogue because I am married and want to have a baby,” she told JTA. “My sister is here because she wants to meet someone and get married.”

The El Ghriba legend is important not only for Tunisian Jews but for Muslims as well.

“This is a holy place for all Djerbians, not just the Jews,” a woman named Khalija said as she was leaving the sanctuary. “I came to light a candle with my Jewish friend.”

Unlike previous years, when the celebration attracted Tunisians and non-Tunisians from abroad, nearly all of this year’s pilgrims were Tunisian.

Many were local Djerbians; others came from Tunis. The remaining were Tunisians visiting from Europe, although the visitors included a couple of French pilgrims.

“My family left Tunisia when I was 10 years old, but I spent almost every summer growing up in Tunisia,” said Isabel, who came with her husband and daughter from Paris. “No one will scare me away from coming here because this is my country. I am Tunisian and will never be afraid of my country.”

Adjacent to the synagogue is a building that once served as an inn housing visitors, primarily Libyan Jews visiting El Ghriba. With the growth of the tourism industry and the establishment of vast hotels in recent years, the building is mostly abandoned year-round.

But during the two-day Hiloula, the inn becomes a center of celebration. Live traditional Tunisian music, in Hebrew and Arabic, is sung to the beat of the darbouka drum.

The smell of fried brik — a flour envelope of potatoes, Tunisian hot sauce known as harissa, parsley and egg — is present in the air. Families sit together on benches and munch on fresh almonds, apricots, oranges, cantaloupe and mulberries that are sold in nearby stands.

For some Tunisians who have been abroad for many years, the celebration is a chance to reconnect with Tunisia. On sale are CDs of famous Tunisian Jewish singers from the community’s past as well as DVD collections of recent Tunisian sitcoms.

Previous celebrations have attracted many Israeli pilgrims, but this year Israel issued a travel warning advising its people not to attend.

Perez Trabelsi, El Ghriba’s president, criticized the Israelis in the local French language Tunisian newspaper, Le Press, for not attending this year.

According to some foreign attendees, many foreign visitors canceled after the Islamist Tunisian party Ennahda invited Youssef Al Qaradawi, a Qatar-based Egyptian sheik well known for his endorsement of suicide bombings, on a multi-city speaking tour of Tunisia in the week leading up to the Hiloula.

An anti-government demonstration in Budapest, December 2011. (Ruth Ellen Gruber)

BUDAPEST (JTA) — The debate over anti-Semitism in Hungary has sharpened since the anti-Israel, anti-Jewish and anti-Roma (Gypsy) Jobbik movement entered Parliament two years ago as the country’s third largest party.

Seeking scapegoats and channeling paranoia at a time of severe economic, social and political woes, Jobbik’s lawmakers regularly — and loudly — spout xenophobic, anti-Roma, anti-Israel and anti-Semitic rhetoric.

Outbursts in Parliament, in local councils and in the media have demolished taboos and increasingly serve to legitimize hate speech in both private conversation and public discourse.

But for the Jewish community, anxiety over anti-Semitism is only one toxic element of a broader and much more complex national crisis that touches all parts of society two years after the 2010 elections swept the conservative Fidesz party to power.

“The danger is about Hungarian democracy, not about anti-Semitism,” Rabbi Istvan Darvas told JTA.

“Everybody feels the crisis,” said Mircea Cernov, CEO of Haver, a foundation that fights anti-Semitism and teaches schoolchildren about Judaism and the Jewish people. “The financial and economic challenges, unemployment and poverty, social, education and health system crisis, democratic system in turbulence — there is no difference between people influenced by all this.”

With a two-thirds majority in Parliament, Prime Minister Victor Orban and his government rewrote the constitution and pushed through controversial new laws that sharply polarized the country and also drew tough criticism from the European Union and other international bodies.

These included new legislation regulating the media, changing how judges are appointed and reducing the number of officially recognized religious bodies. Three Jewish streams have such recognition.

Other new laws cut social benefits, nationalized private pension funds and even outlawed homelessness.

The government said the new laws were needed to consolidate the legal and judicial system. But critics claimed they contributed to a “democracy deficit” and undermined democratic rights.

Jobbik and other extremists have capitalized on the economic uncertainly and social and political polarization to push a virulently nationalist message that stigmatizes Jews, Roma, immigrants and other minority groups.

Fidesz is not formally allied with Jobbik and has condemned anti-Semitism.

But a defense of Hungarian national honor is one of Fidesz’s platforms. Many Hungarian Jews, who traditionally have gravitated toward leftist-liberal parties, are deeply troubled by appeals to nationalism, even by mainstream parties.

And there is a perception among Fidesz opponents that some of its members may be sympathetic to Jobbik’s more extreme stance. This month, for example, the Israeli ambassador to Hungary canceled an official visit to the town of Eger after an audio recording came to light in which a Fidesz town councilor slammed a prominent actor as a “filthy Jew” with leftist-liberal sympathies.

“Intolerance is growing, radical narratives and voices are powerful, and many people feel that the risk of a greater conflict is real,” said Cernov.

The country, he said, faces a “moral crisis” along with its other woes.

“There are no real credible voices and opinion-influencing figures,” he said. “No role models and no people who can set positive reference points. The lack of a minimum platform of common understanding among all democratic parties and civil groups is the real weakness of the Hungarian society.”

In a recent incident, addressing Parliament just before Passover, a Jobbik lawmaker went so far as to advance the blood libel — the accusation that Jews kill Christian children and use their blood for ritual purposes.

And in a February interview with the London Jewish Chronicle, Jobbik foreign affairs spokesman Marton Gyongyosi called Israel a “Nazi system based on racial hatred,” accused Jews of “colonizing” Hungary and stressed Jobbik’s support of Iran.

These developments have ratcheted up the anxiety level for Hungary’s 100,000 Jews, the largest Jewish community in central Europe.

“The gravity of the situation is unprecedented in the past two decades of Hungarian democracy,” Rabbi Shlomo Koves told The Associatied Press. “Although the safety and well-being of Hungarian Jews in their daily life is not physically in danger — or no worse than in any other European country — anti-Semitic public speech has escalated to a point which cannot be ignored by a single decent person.”

Rabbi Andrew Baker, the representative on anti-Semitism to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said it is not simple to gauge the extent and impact of anti-Semitism in Hungary.

“There are real problems and a high degree of uncertainty,” he told JTA after a fact-finding mission to Hungary in April. But, he added, “It is not easy to separate the anxiety that Jews feel together with many other left-of-center Hungarians at current political developments and unease at what are more directly anti-Semitic rumblings.”

Members of the Jewish community said anti-Semitism was widely expressed verbally but there have been few episodes of physical violence.

“Many people are afraid,” said Andras Heisler, a former president of the Federation of Jewish Communities. “But in normal daily life there is not any danger.”

Indeed, unlike in many Western countries, little security is evident at most of Budapest’s 20 or so active synagogues, prayer houses and other Jewish sites.

And Jewish life is lived openly. Budapest may be one of the only capitals where a program linked to this year’s March of the Living was publicized on an advertisement that covered the entire side of a downtown building.

Still, a report released before Passover by the Anti-Defamation League added fuel to alarmist fires.

Based on a telephone survey in which callers asked 500 people in 10 countries four questions regarding anti-Semitic stereotypes, the ADL found that 63 percent of Hungarians held anti-Semitic attitudes.

The report grabbed headlines. But sociologist Andras Kovacs, Hungary’s foremost researcher on anti-Semitism, slammed the report for employing what he called a faulty methodology that favored responses from hard-core anti-Semites, giving a skewed result that fed alarmism.

According to his research, he said, the proportion of anti-Semites in Hungary is 20 to 25 percent.

Cernov called the ADL report “superficial” and “even irresponsible.”

It could, he said, have a negative impact on organizations like Haver that were trying to carry out serious social action and other educational work to combat prejudice and counter extremist trends.

Rabbi Tamas Vero and his wife, Linda Ban Vero, outside Budapest's Frakel Leo street synagogue, where they head a growing congregation mainly made up of young families like themselves. (Ruth Ellen Gruber)

BUDAPEST (JTA) — Linda Ban is a rebbetzin, but with a mass of curly hair and chunky rings on the fingers of both hands, she hardly fits the stereotype of a Central European rabbi’s wife.

A mother of two in her mid-30s, Ban is married to Tamas Vero, the 38-year-old spiritual leader of Budapest’s Frankel Leo Street Synagogue, a neo-Gothic building hidden in a courtyard near the Danube.

The congregation may hold a key to the Jewish future in Hungary.

“My husband and I are building a Jewish community at our synagogue,” Ban says. “But my goal is that our members take Judaism home — into their homes.”

Frankel Leo is among a handful of Budapest synagogues that has seen an upsurge of membership and communal engagement in recent years thanks to active young rabbis and a family-friendly focus.

“A year-and-a-half ago, after I took over as rabbi, our synagogue was almost empty, with just eight or nine people coming on Friday nights,” said Rabbi Istvan Darvas, 38, of the Dozsa Gyorgy Street Synagogue. “Now we have 60 or more each Friday, and we are still growing.”

Another of these congregations, Bet Shalom, had such an increase in membership that it outgrew its premises.

The week before Passover, Bet Shalom, which in the past decade or so has jumped from about 20 members to approximately 250, celebrated the gala inauguration of a rebuilt synagogue complex that includes a new sanctuary that doubles the seating of the previous one to 169.

The event received mainstream media coverage; speakers included the Israeli ambassador.

“It’s the first time in 80 years that a congregation has grown so much that it needed a bigger synagogue,” said Jozsef Horvath, 43, Bet Shalom’s president. “Our old synagogue was too small for the number of people, and there was no place for kiddush and no space for learning.”

With an estimated 80,000 Jews, Budapest has the largest Jewish population of any central European city. It is home to about 20 Jewish congregations, ranging from the dominant Neolog (moderate Conservative) stream to traditional Orthodox and Chabad, to American-style Reform, to informal minyanim such as Dor Hadash, an independent egalitarian congregation that is associated with the Masorti (Conservative) movement.

As in other post-communist countries, there has been a revival of Jewish life and identity since the Iron Curtain came down more than 20 years ago. But the rate of intermarriage remains high — according to surveys about 50 percent — and most of the city’s Jews have nothing to do with organized Jewish life.

Studies show that those who do affiliate often experience Jewishness outside the home and outside the synagogue through organizations that range from the city’s Jewish community center, to youth groups, to the Jewish summer camp at Szarvas in southern Hungary.

Many self-identifying young Jews reject established Judaism and gravitate toward an alternative Jewish youth scene that focuses on cafes and cultural events in the trendy downtown Jewish quarter.

Against this background, the Frankel Leo, Dozsa Gyorgy and Bet Shalom synagogues are, some say, changing the face of Jewish religious life in Hungary.

Led by local rabbis who came of age after the fall of communism, they are attempting to engage young people within the organized mainstream and promote the synagogue as the focus of community, learning and long-term Jewish continuity.

“Real and strong communities can grow around synagogues where families are engaged,” said Mircea Cernov, an educator who attends the Dozsa Gyorgy synagogue. “Probably the children raised in this environment will have an influence in future years.”

Horvath, a civil engineer whose wife is a convert to Judaism, agrees. “This is the future,” he said.

He said he had grown up in an unaffiliated, nonreligious home. It wasn’t until he was about 20 that he learned his mother, a child survivor of the Holocaust, was Jewish. He drew closer to the Jewish world, and to Judaism, when he began to play basketball for the Maccabi sports club in his 20s. He eventually served as the chairman of Maccabi in Hungary for 12 years.

“It was when my first son was born that we decided to start keeping more Jewish rules at home, to light the candles,” Horvath said. “And then, two or three years ago we started coming to Bet Shalom as a family.”

Each of the growing congregations has a different orientation, but all three come under Mazsihisz, the official Jewish umbrella organization. Vero, Darvas and Zoltan Radnoti, the rabbi at Bet Shalom, were all trained at the Neolog Rabbinical Seminary in Budapest.

Radnoti now regards himself as Modern Orthodox, and the new Bet Shalom sanctuary includes a mechitzah, the ritual barrier separating men and women.

He and Darvas both reach out to intermarried families or other non-Jews who wish to convert.

Most of the congregants at Frankel Leo are young couples and families who joined Jewish youth organizations and went to the Szarvas Jewish summer camp as children and teens but had little else to do with organized Jewish life afterward. Now that they are married and have children, said Linda Ban, they are coming back.

“Our congregation is totally based on people we knew at Szarvas or other youth activities, but some of them we haven’t seen for 15 years,” she said. “When they become a family, they want to be Jewish again. But they don’t know how to bring Judaism home, how to have a Jewish home. And I find that sad.”

A rarity in Hungary, Ban and her husband both grew up in traditional Jewish homes. They use their own lives and upbringings as examples in their teaching of Jewish values, traditions and culture to the young families now joining their congregation.

In particular, Ban has incorporated her own family history and experiences in a series of illustrated children’s books that explain and explore Jews, Jewishness and Judaism in simple yet meaningful terms geared toward everyone in any extended modern family.

“Countless parents have difficulty talking to children about Judaism because they are full of unanswered questions themselves,” she wrote in “What Does It Mean to Be Jewish,” one of her books that also was published in an English-language edition.

“I would like to create opportunities,” she wrote, “for all members of the family — grandparents, parents, step-parents and children, Jews and non-Jews, believers and non-believers alike — to talk to each other openly and honestly about Judaism, without taboos, expectations or prescribed answers.”

These days he keeps kosher, wears the long beard and black hat typical of some Orthodox Jews, and assists Poland’s chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich.

Pawel Bramson, left, at the Jewish cemetary in Warsaw. (Kuba Wyszynski)

Bramson’s transformation — documented in the film “The Moon Is Jewish,” which recently received the Warsaw Phoenix Award at the Jewish Motifs International Film Festival for the best film showing modern Jewish life in Poland  — began when he was 22.

Co-written by Bramson and Michal Tkaczynski, the documentary takes its title from a Marcin Swietlicki song that tells of a fabricated Jewish plot to claim that everything — the pillow, the moon — is Jewish.

“The script for this film was written by life,” says Bramson, 36, who discusses his life, past and present, in the documentary.

“The Moon Is Jewish,” which has been screened at several festivals in the United States, “was like a confession on which I say some bad things I did in my life,” he says. “This film can be treated a bit like my public confession, a self-critical lynching.”

As a young man, Bramson wasn’t particularly interested in his roots, having had no reason to think his family had hidden anything from him.

“I was an Aryan, maybe not the blond one, but for sure not Jewish,” he says. As far as he knew, he was the son of practicing Catholics. “The thought of being Jewish was not even on my mind.”

Not until his wife, Aleksandra, began researching her own roots.

“She started looking for her ancestors in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. She was checking her roots and at the same time she checked mine,” Bramson says. “When she found out, she came home and showed me the documents” indicating that both their families had been Jewish.

Bramson sought verification from his parents. The information his wife had found was true, they told him. His maternal grandparents had been Jewish.

The young man began to turn his life around, saying that he realized he wasn’t the person he had thought.

Like other young Poles who have discovered their Jewish roots, Bramson began going to the Jewish Historical Institute, to synagogue, speaking with a rabbi to learn as much as possible about Judaism. He became increasingly involved in the life of Warsaw’s Jewish community.

“My father was delighted when I became Jewish because he always wanted me to be religious, no matter in which religion,” Bramson says.

Now he is a mashgiach, a kosher supervisor, and an assistant to Schudrich.  The chief rabbi calls him a “unique human being.”

“Every day he tries to improve himself as a better human being using his religion, Judaism, as a way to become closer to God and kinder to human beings,” Schudrich says.

Przemyslaw Szpilman, who manages the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw, met Bramson 11 years ago at the city’s Nozyk Synagogue.

“The change in Pawel’s life is huge,” Szpilman says. “It took him many years to become such person he is today. When we met for the first time in the synagogue, he wasn’t sure it is his way of life.”

But Bramson’s wife was going to synagogue daily, and he decided to join her, Szpilman says.

“Like every other Jew here, Pawel is important for Jewish community,” he says. “Every new person is well welcome here.”

Michael Traison, an American lawyer who is involved in numerous projects commemorating Jewish history and culture in Poland, has known Bramson for years.

“Pawel Bramson has been the subject of numerous news reports around the world for several years. Each time his story appears it seems comparable to a news bulletin that life has been discovered on Mars,” Traison says. “Indeed, for much of the Jewish world, believing that all Jewish life in Poland was extinguished almost several decades ago, Poland is Mars and Jewish life is as unlikely as finding a thriving city on a remote planet circling a distant star.”

The symbolism of Bramson’s story, he says, “resonates much like the rebirth of Israel itself.”

There was a time, Bramson acknowledges, that he used to shout anti-Semitic chants at soccer games of his beloved Legia Warsaw club — much like the 18 Legia fans who were charged in March with inciting religious hatred for screaming slogans at fans of Widzew Lodz such as “Hamas, Hamas, Juden auf den Gas” (“Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas”). Several have admitted their guilt.

Despite the club’s rowdy and, in some cases, racist fans, Bramson stands with Legia.

“Yesterday I met a friend with whom I did some crazy things when we were younger,” he says. “We talked about our memories and the fact that they are not the best. Now I see these things in a different way.”

His son, who attends the Talmudical Academy of Baltimore, is also a Legia fan. “I can’t even imagine he couldn’t be. It’s something that must be given in our family from generation to generation,” Bramson says with a laugh.

“When he arrives to Poland and there’s soccer, he goes to the match. Just not on Saturday.”

Asked how difficult it was to change his former life to the one he lives today, Bramson says the evolution isn’t over.

“I’m still changing my life, and I think I will never stop,” he says. “It’s not so simple.”

So by the time I became pregnant with my first child — a boy, go figure! — I knew exactly what kind of mother I was going to be: calm, organized and completely in charge.

Yeah, right.

If only back in those early days of motherhood I had gotten the Talmudic memo about teaching a child according to his way, I would have understood that one-size-fits-all parenting didn’t actually exist, thus saving myself loads of stress.

Ironically it would be my kids themselves who eventually taught me this fundamental truth of raising children, enlightening me one by one, and each according to his or her own unique way.

But I didn’t get that memo, and despite my intentions of being a cool-as-a-cucumber parent, the birth of my first child, Brandon, now 19, transformed me into a maternal tossed salad. For the first two years of his life I refused to leave the house without my “What to Expect” manual for fear I might need to make a baby tourniquet or something.

Impossibly, it would seem, Brandon grew to be the most serene and easygoing person I’ve ever known. Like a human tranquilizer, he puts me at ease, offering me a voice of reason in a way few others can.

“You should be less worried about me getting E. coli from a raw hamburger and more worried about me choking on this overcooked hockey puck,” he once said during dinner.

I had to laugh. He had a point — and it wasn’t the first time. I needed to chill. Maybe I’m not the unflappable parent I’d hoped to be, but thanks to my laid-back eldest, I’m a little closer to it.

Where Brandon was born to go with the flow, my second son, Alex, 17, carves his own current.

When he was 12, Alex wanted to take electric guitar lessons. I said no — he had enough going on with school, baseball and football. So he got some secondhand strings, taught himself to play via instructional YouTube videos and started a rock band with some middle-school buddies.

Take-charge Mama might have grounded her willful son, but something in me had changed. Instead of getting angry, I threw a huge party in the basement and invited everyone over for The Allies’ first concert.

Somewhere along the way, this staunchly inner-directed child had taught me that my purpose in parenting was not to tell him when, where and how to flap his wings, but to give him the ability to soar on his own.

By the time Jake came along, I was less hovering (thanks, Brandon) and less controlling (thanks, Alex). But I was still clinging to my super-organized, scheduled-down-to-the-last-minute tendencies. My third son changed all that.

Here is a 12-year-old brimming with curiosity, who collects information like other kids collect baseball cards. Mothering him is like being a perpetual contestant on “Jeopardy!”

The trouble is, joining Jake in his knowledge quests can take a lot of time. Practice with him for the geography bee? Of course. But I had to brush up first.

Read the “Hunger Games” series with him? Sure. And 28 hours of reading later (yes, 28!), we finally finished the last book. I wouldn’t have missed those juicy mother-son book chats for anything.

With Jake as my guide, I’ve learned to look up from my weekly planner every now and then to stop and smell the roses, even if they’re not exactly on the way.

But even avid rose-smelling couldn’t fend off the exhaustion that arrived with my final pregnancy. Ten years older than I was for round one, with 10 zillion more things to do, I doubted whether I’d ever drum up the energy to parent baby number four.

Enter my spirited Emma to help me find it.

Approaching the world as an ongoing wild party, my daughter dances, twirls and cartwheels her way through life. Her joie de vivre is as contagious to me as it is exhausting,  as renewing as it is bittersweet in its reminder that my days of little-kid parenting are coming to a close.

Emma recently beckoned me to her room to see a display of 12 dolls she’d lined up on her bed. “They’re my babies!” she announced, providing a wistful reminder of the girl I used to be.

“But how will I know how to be a good mommy?” she asked, suddenly serious.

“Don’t worry, Em,” I reassured her, “your children will teach you.”

Sharon Duke Estroff, the author of Can I Have a Cell Phone for Hanukkah? (Random House), is an internationally syndicated Jewish parenting advice columnist; a freelance feature writer for national magazines including Good Housekeeping, Woman’s Day and Parents; and a parenting blogger for The Huffington Post.