JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

Bāqā al-Gharbiyya received municipal status. Bāqā al-Sharqiyya,
which remained on the Jordanian side of the border in
1949, was occupied by Israel during the Six-Day War of 1967.
In contrast to Bāqā al-Gharbiyya, its layout and economic and
social structure remained largely traditional. Its population in
1967 was 1,205, rising to 3,054 in 1997.
[Efraim Orni]
BAʿQŪBA, town c. 25 mi. (40 km.) north of Baghdad. Under
the Abbasid caliphate, Baʿqūba was a district center, with
a prosperous Jewish community. At the end of the eighth century,
Manasseh b. R. Joseph of Baʿqūba, was head of the academy
of *Pumbedita. Even later, many Jews lived in the town. In
the early 12th century, a self-styled herald of the messiah, Ibn
Shadad, appeared in Baʿqūba and began a movement which
was suppressed by the Muslim authorities. The community
existed into the 19th century.
Bibliography: J. Obermeyer, Landschaft Babylonien (1929),
144f.; Goitein, in: JJS, 4 (1953), 79; Mann, in: REJ, 71 (1920), 90f.; A.
Ben-Jacob, Yehudei Bavel (1965), 13f., 222.
[Eliyahu Ashtor]
BAR, town in Vinnitsa oblast, Ukraine. Bar passed to Russia
at the second partition of Poland in 1793, and from 1796 to the
1917 Russian Revolution was a district capital in the province
(government) of Podolia. The Bar community was one of the
oldest in the Ukraine. Jews are first mentioned there in 1542.
By an agreement concluded in 1556 with the citizens of Bar,
the Jews were permitted to own buildings and had the same
rights and duties as the other residents; they were permitted to
visit other towns in the district for business purposes but were
forbidden to provide lodging for Jewish visitors in the city. The
agreement was formally ratified the same year by the Polish
king Sigismund II. The community grew during the second
half of the 16th and the first half of the 17th century, and Jews
from Bar engaged in trade in places as far away as Moldavia.
According to a contemporary chronicler, the Bar community
in 1648 numbered some 600 Jewish families, “men of wealth
and standing.” During the *Chmielnicki uprising in that year,
many of the Jews in Bar were massacred. There was a further
slaughter of the Jewish inhabitants by Cossacks and Tatars in
1651. There were 17 houses (out of 107) in Jewish ownership
in Bar in 1565, 23 in 1570–71, and approximately 20 in 1661. In
1717, authorization to erect a synagogue in Bar was granted
by the bishop. After 1793, under Russian rule, the community
also developed. The Jewish population numbered 4,442
in 1847, 5,773 in 1897 (58% of the total), and 10,450 (46%) in
1910. Between 1910 and World War I, Jews opened factories
based on agricultural products, such as sugar, linen, tobacco,
and vodka. They owned most of the shops in town, and the
only pharmacy and were the majority of artisans. Twenty Jews
in Bar lost their lives during a pogrom in the summer of 1919.
Religious and communal life came to an end with the establishment
of the Soviet government. In the 1920s some 300
families lived from workmanship, 28 were clerks and workers,
bara, theda
150 heads of families worked in agriculture, some of them in a
Jewish farm cooperative. The Jewish population totaled 5,270
in 1926 (55%) and 3,869 (total population – 9406) in 1939. In
the 1930s 1,000 worked in various factories and 400 in industrial
cooperatives; 53 families were members of a Jewish kolkhoz.
The Germans occupied Bar on July 16, 1941. In December
two ghettos were created, surrounded by barbed wire. On August
19, 1942, 3,000 Jews of the first ghetto were concentrated
and kept for three days without food and water. In the nearby
Jewish cemetery 1,742 Jews were killed, and the others, mostly
young people, were taken to the abandoned ghetto, which
turned into a working camp. On October 15, 1942, the 2,000
Jews of the second ghetto were murdered. Most of the working
youngsters were killed one by one or died from hunger or
diseases. Bar was liberated on March 25, 1944. In 1993 there
were 199 Jews living there.
Bibliography: Bulletin of Rescue Committee of Jewish Agency
for Palestine (May 1946), 6–8; M. Carp, Cartea Neagrǎ, 3 (1947), index;
idem, Transnistria, Lebn, Leidn un Umkum (1950), 263.
[Yehuda Slutsky]
BAR, SHLOMO (1944– ), singer, composer, drummer, and
flutist. Bar was born in Morocco and came to Israel at the
age of six. In 1977, against a background of social and cultural
unrest in Israel, Bar founded a small ensemble which
he called Ha-Breirah ha-T’ivit (“The Natural Selection”),
whose very name hinted at the prevailing tensions. His first
group included musicians of different origins: an American
guitarist, an Indian Jewish violinist, and an Israeli-born Jew
of Bokharian origin as contrabassist. They created an amalgamated,
completely new style, dominated by his powerful
personality. Bar supported the artistic ideals of the East in a
broad sense, which stood in clear opposition to those of the
West. In contrast to the complexity and sophistication of the
architectonics of sound – the crowning achievement of Western
musical art – Bar placed spontaneity at the center of his
work, in improvisations characteristic of Eastern music. He
created a style in which he integrated widely divergent musical
traditions while endowing his work with a pervasive “Oriental”
spirit. It thus represents a balance of stylistic plurality
and stylistic fusion. From around the mid-1990s, the group
evolved and changed, so that the music, like the group, came
to represent a much greater range of cultures. The group made
several tours, including trips to the U.S., Canada, and Europe,
and participated in various international music festivals. Thus,
Bar and some other musicians turned “Orientalization” into a
conscious ideology, which reflected, in the field of music, the
culturally as well as politically motivated aspiration to achieve
“separate but equal” status for Oriental culture in Israel.
[Amnon Shiloah (2nd ed.)]
BARA, THEDA (Theodosia Goodman; 1885–1955), U.S. film
actress. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Theda Bara was noted for
her femme fatale roles. William Fox recognized her potential
ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 3 123