Totally delightful article.
"About an hour’s drive north of Seoul, in the Gwangju Mountains, nearly
fifty South Korean children pore over a book. The text is an unlikely
choice: the Talmud, the fifteen-hundred-year-old book of Jewish laws.
The students are not Jewish, nor are their teachers, and they have no
interest in converting. Most have never met a Jew before. But, according
to the founder of their school, the students enrolled with the goal of
receiving a “Jewish education” in addition to a Korean one."
"It was hard to imagine South Koreans halfway around the world deriving
any value from this book without a guide like the rabbi at my Jewish day
school. But, as it happens, they do have a guide: a
seventy-eight-year-old rabbi named Marvin Tokayer, who lives in Great
Neck."
Read the whole thing.
