My father really enjoyed Hadassah Magazine. As a dyslexic, he read slowly and also very carefully. As an intelligent individual, he had a significant vocabulary and particularly appreciated well-written and well-thought-out articles. I suspect he read each issue more closely than did my lifetime Hadassah member mother. My parents also enjoyed traveling — to see new places and to visit old friends. Not surprisingly, the Hadassah Magazine articles that highlight Jewish communities around the world were a favorite feature of theirs.

A number of years ago, my husband, daughter and I traveled to Spain on a trip that included a number of historic Jewish cities and sites, including Maimonides’s Cordoba, Nachmanides’s Girona and stunningly beautiful synagogue buildings that had been converted to other uses after the 1492 expulsion of Jews from Spain.

In one small town, we unexpectedly came across an excavation, la Sinagoga del Agua (the Synagogue of Water), where a subterranean mikvah (ritual bath) and other indications of hidden Jewishness had been found. So, as delighted Jewish travelers, we took the tour.

My father, rarely a cynic, later observed that Spain seemed happy to market its antisemitic past to attract Jewish tourist dollars. This put a whole new spin on my travel thinking. Rarely, almost never, had we visited Jewish sites when we traveled domestically or internationally. Except, of course, in Israel or when traveling for b’nai mitzvah and weddings.

When I was 11 or 12, we drove cross country and stopped at the US Air Force Academy campus in Colorado. For the next 40 years, my father extolled the design of its Jewish chapel. But that’s the only example I can think of.

Then, one........

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