Jewish Asia

Lubavitch Laptops

Rabbi Avi Shlomo talks with a local Jew on the Greek island of Rhodes.

by Sharon Udasin

They may be in Thessaloniki or in the foothills of the Himalayas, but emissaries-to-be in the Rebbe’s Army — as befits the high tech-savvy Chabad movement — are online all the while.

This summer in Chabad’s long-running “Roving Rabbis” program, in which rabbis-in-training are dispatched to far-flung locales to help out local emissaries, they are also assigned to blog about their experiences of the movement’s flagship site, chabad.org.

The posts tell riveting stories of survival during the Holocaust and simple ones of Jews living life far off the beaten path.

This year, in the program’s 64th summer of operation, 400 rabbis and students visited 34 countries worldwide, as well as regions of America. Their goals? Cater to the specific needs of local Jewish communities, no matter how small or how secular.

“The impact these visits have had upon the lives of hundreds of thousands worldwide are legend,” said Rabbi Moshe Kotlarsky, chairman of the International Conference of Chabad-Lubavitch Emissaries. “The yeshiva students are full of youthful vigor and enthusiasm, a deeply ingrained sense of mission and lots of love for fellow man.”

Walking through the ancient streets of Ioannina, a city in northwest Greece, Rabbi Laima Barber, 24, suddenly felt the piercing stare of an elderly woman, who began pointing at him and yelling desperately, “Israel, Israel?”  Continue reading…

‘Sex And The City,’ Beijing Style

Often wearing her “gefilte fish” t-shirt and sipping He’brew beer, Anna Sophie Lowenberg turns her encounters with Beijing men into 10-minute webisodes.

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

In a bright pink button-up dress, white knee-highs and dangly earrings, a daringly confident Su Fei saunters into a swanky Beijing boutique hotel for an evening of speed-dating, where she’ll sit down with 21 eligible bachelors — like Hai, Wukejia and Richard.

But for Su Fei, a curly-haired Carrie Bradshaw look-alike whose real name is Anna Sophie Loewenberg, finding a boyfriend in Beijing isn’t easy.

“If you had kids with a Jewish girl, they’d be Jewish,” she tells Richard. “Would you be okay with that?” Because, well, whether he likes it or not, “they just are.”

Loewenberg, 35, is the producer, writer and star of the online television show “Sexy Beijing,” which chronicles the wanderings of a Jewish American journalist looking for love in China’s capital city. Roaming the streets of Beijing, the Los Angeles native interviews university students, hardhat workers and elderly couples about their love lives — asking very personal questions and usually getting answers. The 10-minute episodes range from a foray in traditional Chinese matchmaking, to a study of Valentine’s Day, to a visit with the local Chabad Lubavitch community. Meanwhile, Loewenberg goes by the more pronounceable Chinese name of “Su Fei,” despite its double meaning as a brand of Chinese maxi-pads. Her shtick — with nearly 3.6 million YouTube hits — has landed her in English-language Chinese papers, on the Today Show and even in a Q&A on The New Yorker’s Web site.

“I think of Su Fei as an alter ego, but I think there’s a kernel of truth in everything — there’s nothing that I would say about a relationship or I’d say about my experiences that doesn’t have some truth in it,” she told The Jewish Week in a phone interview. “As we’ve been doing the show over the years, I’ve given myself more and more space to create the character of Su Fei and make it less about my own life.” Continue reading…