Student uses travel grant funded by an IC parent to study a nearly extinct culture.   by Greg Ryan ’08

The Greek islands of Rhodes and Crete once featured a flourishing Jewish culture. Today that culture is almost extinguished, as nearly the entire Jewish population of the islands perished or was dislocated during the Holocaust.

Last summer, a student grant allowed one Ithaca College student to help keep that culture alive. Adina Mindick ’08, the first-ever recipient of the Golberstein Jewish Studies Travel-Study Grant, spent two months on the islands, photographing their remaining Jewish sites and working and studying in the new Rhodes Jewish Museum and the Etz Hayyim Synagogue in Crete. Her experiences on the islands were eye-opening, she says: “The Jewish culture in Greece is really different from Eastern European Jewish culture.”

Leah Golberstein, parent of Raphael Golberstein ’06, created the travel-study grant in 2006 for students minoring in Jewish studies and interested in learning more about the Jewish diaspora. In February, Golberstein flew in from Minnesota to attend Mindick’s public presentation about her research on the unique history and challenges of Greek Jews.

 Golberstein hopes many students take advantage of the annual grant.