Barbara Angelakis

Portugal is small … really small. In fact you could fit the entire country into the area between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Yet, its impact on the world has been and continues to be huge! There is a great diversity of environments for such a small country. Happily, we had an opportunity to re-visit Madeira, one of the Portuguese islands located smack dab in the Atlantic Ocean.

In their haunting 1965 song, Simon & Garfunkel sang soulfully of “The Sounds of Silence.” These were only poetic words to me until my trip to Zimbabwe, when I felt the full weight of those words as we drove along a rutted dirt road in Hwange National Park. It was early morning and bitter cold in the Southern Hemisphere’s winter month of June. The silence was an almost physical presence as we peered into the darkness searching for the animals we had traveled so far to see.

Prague cityscape. Photo by Barbara Angelakis. The history of the Jews of Prague began in the 1st century, a time when Jews traveled as merchants in caravans throughout middle Europe, trading in both goods and slaves. By universal decree, Jews were prohibited from owning property, which severely limited their career choices. The few options that were open to them were the less desirable but profitable business of selling human beings, which was big business in the early centuries.