Exodus

The eight-day Jewish festival of Sukkot, or Feast of the Tabernacles, runs through today. It celebrates the fall harvest and commemorates the desert wandering of the Hebrews during the Exodus.

Phillies fans could be seen this week abandoning a sparsely attended home game against the hard-hitting Colorado Rockies in the ninth inning of a tie game. Why the exodus? It may partly have been the pain of knowing that a team 22 games out of first place was about to lose another. And part was the urge to beat the traffic out of South Philadelphia, such as it was on a night when empty seats outnumbered fans 5 to 1. It makes one wonder about whether the team is making a big mistake running away from the idea of building a new ballpark in Center City.

At sunset last night, Jews around the world began their observance of Passover, an ancient eight-day festival that celebrates God's deliverance of their ancestors from slavery in Egypt. Many Jews consider the Exodus the single most important event in their history, because when Moses led the Jewish people from bondage in Egypt they moved to Sinai, where he received the Ten Commandments. The first night of the holiday is marked by a seder, the ritual 14-course meal during which foods such as bitter herbs, roasted meats, greens and matzo, or unleavened bread, symbolize the Passover themes of redemption and freedom.

Leon Uris, the tough-guy, self-educated 78-year-old author of Exodus whose career in best-selling fiction proved anything but a land of milk and honey, died Saturday at his home on New York's Shelter Island. His ex-wife, the photographer Jill Uris, said yesterday that he had succumbed to complications of diabetes. While critics and reviewers typically associated Uris with other page-turner Jewish novelists high on plot and historical window-dressing, such as Irving Wallace and Irving Stone, Uris more accurately resembled James Michener in his fierce commitment to personal research and Elie Wiesel in his unerring moralistic bent.

Wednesday was the first night of Passover and a few of us gathered to have a seder - partly to celebrate, partly just to spend some time together thinking about something other than the war in Kosovo. But the bitter irony of commemorating an ancient exodus in the midst of an ongoing one is not lost on any of us. The news from Macedonia's borders is numbing. Thousands of people are attempting to cross from Kosovo, and only a segment is succeeding. The Macedonian border police say they are coping with these numbers of people as best they can, but tales from refugees indicate otherwise.

Like fruit flies, gubernatorial administrations have a natural life cycle. They start off in a frenzy of activity, slow down, and then end before you know it. The Ridge administration seems to be obeying these laws of political biology. With 22 months left in Gov. Ridge's second and final term, a steady stream of senior advisers and cabinet officers is flowing out of town. The exodus was put into sharp relief last week as two high-profile officials - Education Secretary Eugene Hickok and Environmental Secretary James Seif - announced their departures.

The liberation of the Jews from slavery in Egypt is a freedom story that resonates beyond the Bible and will be remembered at countless seder tables Wednesday evening with the beginning of Passover. The renowned Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel calls the Exodus a moment so central to Judaism that the event defines the people for eternity. Yet Judaism has been openly grappling lately with an uncomfortable reality: Archaeologists and other experts are finding no solid evidence that the Exodus, and the slavery in Egypt, ever really happened.

Each morning at rush hour this week, there's been something unnatural on the Market-Frankford El. It's been there on the Schuylkill Expressway, too, and on other rush-hour highways and transit lines. And in restaurants, in stores and at the offices. You may have noticed it. Elbow room. With the waning of summer has come the annual exodus of residents and workers who have gone down the Shore, to the Poconos, to grandma's or some sun-fried island - all grabbing for a last bit of vacation before that first nip in the air, before school opens and before Christmas displays start creeping into the malls.

'We are witnessing biblical events!" So yelps Ben (Idris Elba), a rattled tough guy (check out his bullet scars), as he and his boss, miracle-debunker Katherine Winter (Hilary Swank), run around the mossy bayous of the South. Since arriving in sleepy Haven, La., the duo have been swarmed by locusts, pelted by frogs, freaked by dead cows, and grossed out by a lovely river turned to blood. It's the plagues of Exodus, all right, and they're coming to a theater near you - just in time for Passover and Easter!

Flyers center Michal Handzus signed with the Zvolen hockey club in his native Slovakia yesterday as the number of NHL players competing in Europe rose to 231 during the lockout. Handzus scored a career-high 58 points (20 goals, 38 assists) for the Flyers last season. Toronto's Nik Antropov and Pittsburgh's Steve McKenna also joined European clubs. Antropov, a center, joined Ak Bars Kazan in Russia. He collected 13 goals and 18 assists in 62 games with the Maple Leafs last season.

By Khan Mohammad Danishju Despite President Obama's surprise visit to Afghanistan last week to sign a far-reaching agreement committing the United States to long-term support of the embattled nation, many Afghans remain fearful about what will happen after the last of the foreign security forces depart at the end of 2014. One indication of this growing concern is the increasing number of Afghans leaving the country. According to Mohammad Nader Farhad, a spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, more than 30,000 Afghans sought asylum in Europe in 2011, a 30 percent increase over the previous year.

MOSCOW - Over a bottle of vodka and a traditional Russian salad of pickles, sausage, and potatoes tossed in mayonnaise, a group of friends raised their glasses and wished Igor Irtenyev and his family a happy journey to Israel. Irtenyev, his wife, and their daughter insisted they would be away for just six months, but the sadness in their eyes that night said otherwise. A successful Russian poet, Irtenyev, 64, said he could no longer breathe freely in his homeland because "with each passing year, and even with each passing day, there is less and less oxygen around.

Center City's office market is still lots weaker and cheaper than New York's. But vacancies have slipped lower for three quarters in a row, to 14 percent at the end of June, from 15 percent three months earlier, according to the lease trackers at the local outpost of the national office broker Grubb & Ellis . It's worse in the suburbs, where the drug industry, whose glass offices and labs stud the U.S. 202 corridor south to Wilmington, have...

LORCA, Spain - Thousands fled this small Spanish agricultural city Thursday, fearing aftershocks might level it after the country's deadliest earthquakes in 55 years killed nine people and caused extensive damage. Lorca was transformed into a ghost town, with a steady stream of cars carrying many of its 90,000 residents to nearby cities and towns to stay with relatives. Stores, restaurants, and schools were closed; the sirens of police vehicles and ambulances filled the air, and helicopters hovered overhead.

By Jack Stollsteimer More than 70 percent of the Philadelphia School District's students live in poverty, and poverty and hopelessness breed violence in our neighborhoods and, by extension, our schools. As middle-class families have all but abandoned the district's neighborhood schools, the challenge has only become more daunting. Now poverty and violence are combining to produce an existential threat to the district. The district's student population has declined by 19 percent over the last decade, leaving more than 70,000 vacant desks in the schools.

Temple University scholar Kyle Cleveland was exhausted but satisfied when contacted Monday by phone in Hong Kong. He'd completed his mission - safely escorting a group of Japan campus students on an evacuation flight to Chinese territory, then seeing them onto planes headed home to the United States. Now, he's turning around to fly back to Tokyo. While classes remain canceled at the Temple campus, Cleveland, an associate professor of sociology, has a pressing worry: His wife's family lives about 50 kilometers from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant.

HOPE PREGNANCY isn't a medical clinic - it only looks like one. Situated in the 700 block of North Broad Street, it offers free pregnancy testing and ultrasound imaging in a clinical setting, but it's actually a church-run counseling center, a distinction that's not always apparent to the distraught women who walk in seeking assistance with crisis pregnancies. In a neighborhood in which health-care options are sorely limited, it's easy to see how a woman, especially one in an emotionally distressed state, might be confused about what it is that Hope does.

The Epic Story of America's Great Migration By Isabel Wilkerson Random House. 622 pp. $30 Reviewed by Michael D. Schaffer Half a century after the Civil War set African Americans free, another war gave them the chance finally to flee the brutal apartheid that had replaced slavery in the American South. World War I disrupted the flow of immigrants from Europe to the United States, forcing industries in the North to begin looking for a new pool of cheap labor. They found it in the African Americans of the South, and sent recruiters into Dixie with a message of opportunity in the cities of the North.

Residents in Center City and near South Street were frustrated in the past year over the sporadic but disruptive behavior of youth-led flash mobs that rampaged through their neighborhoods and businesses in search of thrills. But to thousands of Philadelphians who live and work around some of the city?s most troubled schools, almost any day can be lika flash mob. They say that they witness a daily dose of cursing, fighting and blatant disregard for their homes, businesses and any semblance of sanity.

Several parents of special education students from Germantown Settlement Charter School are demanding action because they say an exodus of qualified staff and a lack of services for their children has created an educational emergency. At least three parents have contacted the state Department of Education and the nonprofit Education Law Center seeking assistance. But they are finding that the state's 1997 charter school law provides little help. The law gives districts the power to close a charter school immediately if there is a "serious risk" to the health and safety of students and staff, but not for educational lapses.