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"A people's memory is history; and as a man without a memory, so
 a people without a history cannot grow wiser, better."  I. L. Peretz
What Elie Wiesel told the Dalai Lama.*

One day in the late seventies, the Dalai Lama asked for a meeting with Elie Wiesel. According to Wiesel, the Dalai Lama said, "I'm familiar with your work, what you wrote about the Jewish people losing a homeland two thousand years ago and how you're still here. Mine has just lost its homeland, and I know it's going to be a very long road into exile. How did you survive?"

Wiesel replied, "When we left Jerusalem, we didn't take all our jewels with us. All we took was a little book. It was the book that kept us alive. Second, because of our exile, we developed a sense of solidarity. When Jews left one place for the next, there were always Jews to welcome and take care of them. And, third, good memory. Survival takes a good memory."
 

* Thanks to Evan Osnos "The Next Incarnation" The New Yorker October 4, 2010 (bold added)

 

  

 

The aim of www.ClevelandJewishHistory.net is to present more Cleveland Jewish history to more persons by:

  • Developing hyperlinked pages to make it easier to find online Cleveland Jewish history.

  • Increasing our web-based history with pages created on this site by similarly interested persons.

  • Encouraging organizations to present their history on the web, on this site or their own.

This website is a work in progress.

It began in 1998 when I was working on my first website, for the wedding of my youngest daughter. She was being married at The Temple at University Circle. This stirred memories of Abba Hillel Silver who had been my rabbi, and soon I was creating a page of links to web pages about him. In a few years that page had grown to a 20 page site - the only one on Cleveland's leading Jewish citizen. In December 2006 my Silver pages became the nucleus of this new website, which has since grown to more than 250 pages, more than 600 images and more than 500 links to other websites.

Since 2007 many of these pages have been written by or their content furnished by others (see our Acknowledgements page), so each year this site becomes more of a group enterprise. We hope that trend continues, for so many of us have stories to share.

Your comments and participation are welcome.

Arnie Berger
 

About the Editor - Webkeeper

 

Arnold Berger was educated as an Industrial Engineer at RPI and MIT and came to Cleveland to work at Lincoln Electric. He earned a PhD at Case and served on the faculty of Case Tech, the Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh and Cleveland State University. He worked on the federation of Case and Western Reserve, consulted in information systems, and founded a company that for 17 years provided application software, networking and computer systems to law firms and foundations. Now semi-retired, he has been a website developer since 1998.


His website work generally has been long-term and his role, as it is with this, his primary website, has been webmaster (creator of pages), author and researcher, and also editor, working with other authors. The sites include a memorial to Luboml, a vanished shtetl (9 years), his Shaker Square neighborhood (8) Council Gardens (2) and recently the Jewish Scene radio broadcasts - plus commercial sites such for one of the largest hard money lenders.

For years he was webmaster of the sites of the Reconstructionist movement (4), Congregation Kol HaLev (9), and Jewish Currents magazine (6). His SEO (Search Engine Optimization) work helps websites rank high on searches.

He wrote the "From the Archive" column in the Cleveland Jewish News for a year, ending in October 2011

Arnold Berger PhD