Armistice Day in France, Museum of Alsatian Jewry
Lembach,
Alsace,
France
Monday, May 8, 2006
Today was a holiday (Armistice Day) so Daniel didn't have to work. After breakfast (French bread with honey and leftover quiche lorraine), Daniel and Carol went over what they had found and still need to find, I labeled photos and played on my laptop, and we listened to Jonathan practicing his bass violin (he's very good-and plays piano and guitar as well). We watched Daniel and Denise make lunch-in a pressure cooker. Choucroute (homemade sauerkraut, salted pork and sausages-very good, and I don't like sauerkraut or sausages).
After lunch we went to Bouxwiller (about 40 km southwest) to the Judeo-Alsatian Museum. It is in the old synagogue and is very well done. The caretaker is a retired professor and he spoke English, he and I talked a bit. He had relatives who went to New Orleans, so Carol gave him her name and he gave her the names of his relatives (Weils) and she will research them for him. On the way back we stopped at the Jewish cemetery at Ettendorf, a tiny town but with a huge Jewish cemetery, covering 26 communities.. The book I bought at the museum said there were over 1400 graves dating from the 16th century. However, they were in pretty bad shape and only the Hebrew inscriptions were legible and we don't read Hebrew. We also stopped to see the synagogue at Pfaffenhoffen-it is just a two-story house that was used as a synagogue, nothing interesting.
Dinner was a delicious onion tart-flaky crust, sliced onion, light cheese and eggs. With it we had radishes (not round, but oval) with salt, bread, of course, and the end of Bettina's birthday cake. We were all tired and retired to our rooms about 9 p.m.
