Youpe Last Week

Another week and another look at another week’s goings-on in Europe, or as Grandma Riva, born in Horodenka, Ukraine, circa 1888 — featured here holding a very young Jack Friedman after being called away from her weekly poker game — called it, “Youpe.”

The European Commission may give Spain extra funds to deal with the surge of more than 72,000 migrants from Morocco into the city of Ceuta last week, which doubled the city’s population. In Vilnius, Lithuania, archaeologists have discovered one of Europe’s largest synagogues. Centuries before the Holocaust, it was the spot where rabbis would read from the Torah to a massive congregation at the Great Synagogue of Vilna. The excavation has been led by the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Lithuanian cultural heritage organisation Kultūros Paveldo Išsaugojimo Pajėgos (KPIP), with funding from the Good Will Foundation and in cooperation with the Lithuanian Jewish Community. Excavation co-director Jon Seligman told the Times of Israel: “This was the most important synagogue of Lithuanian Jewry for several centuries.” The city had 60,000 Jews before the Holocaust, 40 per cent of its total population.