When you step off a 15-hour plane ride and face the stark realization that you will be without running water, a flushing toilet, electricity, a refrigerator, a microwave, or air conditioning for the next five months, that is when you know you have stepped out of your comfort zone. When you realize that you are unexpectedly the only white person in the village in which you will be living, let alone the only Jew (my coworker thought we were extinct), that is when you know your comfort zone is worlds away.

This is how I spent much of the last half-year, and I loved it. You might think I am crazy, and I will not disagree with you. However, when you throw yourself into a culture half-a-world away from your own, forcing you to challenge your own beliefs, you live in constant fascination at how the world operates so smoothly — after you learn to shower properly with a bucket, milk a cow, slaughter a chicken, and cook over a wood-burning fire, that is.

There was good reason for celebration in the board room of the Kaplen Jewish Community Center on the Palisades on Tuesday night. Two weeks before, the JCC had received a check for $1.5 million from the Henry and Marilyn Taub Foundation — marking the successful conclusion to six years of fundraising and construction that renovated the JCC’s 40-year-old building and brought in $32 million in donations from the community.

The board members had reason to drink champagne. They had succeeded in an audacious fundraising campaign — one whose scope had sparked heated discussions over the years. And they had reached into their own pockets to grow the institution they loved, that many of them had grown up in, giving to the original capital and endowment campaign and then, this past year, to what was called the Taub Community Challenge. That, in fact, had been a condition of Henry Taub, when he agreed, on his hospital bed shortly before his death last March, to donate $1.5 million: The JCC had to come up with $3 million from other donors, and within a year. “Henry wanted the community to step up and take ownership,” recalls Pearl Seiden, president of the JCC.

Few Jewish couples define their marriage as “mixed” just because bride and groom were born and raised 30 miles apart in the same country.

Linda and Bernard Levy, however, live in Belgium, a country whose long experiment in fusing two distinct cultures recently has been showing signs of breakdown. With the Dutch-speaking Flemish half of the country increasingly at odds with the French-speaking part, Belgium’s corresponding Jewish communities are finding themselves at loggerheads, as well.

Linda was born in Antwerp, the capital of Flanders in the self-governing Flemish region. She rarely uses Flemish (similar to Dutch), the language of her youth, since she married Bernard, a Francophone from Brussels. They live just outside Brussels with their three children.

As a long-time resident who is completing his first two-year term as mayor of Teaneck and was decisively re-elected to his third council term on Tuesday, Mohammed Hameeduddin has come to understand and revel in the commonalities between his Muslim community and the Jewish community which he serves, and which helped elect him.

Being on the campaign trail — such as it was, in the run-up to this past Tuesday’s municipal’s elections — highlighted one aspect of that commonality.

“The Jewish people of Teaneck are very similar to the Muslim community, because when you walk in, the first thing everybody makes sure to ask is ‘Did you eat?’ That’s the first question every grandmother asks. It’s very similar if you walk into a Muslim household from south Asia,” says Hameeduddin, whose parents came to America from India in the late 1960s.

Few Jewish couples define their marriage as “mixed” just because bride and groom were born and raised 30 miles apart in the same country.

Linda and Bernard Levy, however, live in Belgium, a country whose long experiment in fusing two distinct cultures recently has been showing signs of breakdown. With the Dutch-speaking Flemish half of the country increasingly at odds with the French-speaking part, Belgium’s corresponding Jewish communities are finding themselves at loggerheads, as well.

Linda was born in Antwerp, the capital of Flanders in the self-governing Flemish region. She rarely uses Flemish (similar to Dutch), the language of her youth, since she married Bernard, a Francophone from Brussels. They live just outside Brussels with their three children.

Lithuania’s 800-year-old connection to its Jewish population broke down in 1941, when the Nazis invaded the country and murdered nearly all of its 200,000 Jews — often with the complicity of local Lithuanians.

Last month, 70 years on, Lithuania finally passed historic compensation legislation to provide some $50 million in compensation to Jewish families whose property was confiscated during the Shoah. Jewish groups hailed the move as a milestone for Lithuanian-Jewish relations.

Lingering bitterness on both sides over the discussion of Lithuanian complicity in the Holocaust remains an obstacle to better ties, however.