Beautiful Barbados

This is from the Crane Blog at http://blog.thecrane.com/crane-recognized-for-fractional-ownershipvillage-happenings/

Crane Recognized for Fractional Ownership…Village Happenings

Posted in: News on: May 12, 2009

Crane celebrated in “Top 10 of the Best Fractional Homes”

In the May 2009 issue of Homes Overseas, the UK’s leading international property magazine since 1965, The Crane was named in the Top 10 of the Best Fractional Homes worldwide by George Sell, a writer for the magazine who focuses on fractional ownership.

Village Happenings

The Crane recently celebrated the opening of two more shops in the retail Village with the opening of Barbados’ oldest retailer Cave Shepherd, along with our own mini-General Store – a preview of the larger General Store soon to come.

Local tour operators and ground handlers joined guests and managers for a cocktail party to celebrate the new Cave Shepherd store, which features the “On the Beach” brand of resort and surf wear, Pages bookstore offering books and magazines for the guests’ reading pleasure, and duty-free shopping featuring liquor, perfumes, and souvenirs.

Shortly thereafter the resort was pleased to open our very own mini corner store, where guests have been shopping for conveniences including wines, snacks, and digging into the ever-popular ice cream freezer!

In addition, The Village now features a lovely conference and event area called The Town Hall, ideal for meetings, banquets and wedding receptions.

Coming soon to the Village – opening in June - will be Dingolay, a casual wear boutique, and Tamarind Seed, a craft store featuring the best of Barbadian and Caribbean art and craft.

Throughout the summer and fall, additional openings will include Ozone Health and Fitness Centre, D’Onofrio’s Italian Restaurant and Pizza Terrace, The Village Café and Bar 1887.

Introducing….

Look out for our daytime Duty Manager, Carolyn Johnson, when you are next on property. A transplanted Canadian who has long called Barbados home, she is on hand walking the property and checking rooms and will be happy to have a chat with you during your visit to assist with any queries or concerns you may have.

Colombian Emeralds opens in new Crane Village

Steel Pan in the Crane Village

This week The Crane unveiled the first opening in the new Village retail shopping and dining area, with a celebratory cocktail party for members, in-house guests, and Barbados’ Minister of Tourism, the Hon. Richard Sealy.

The party truly sparkled, with live steel pan music complementing the shiny jewels on display in the brand-new Colombian Emeralds store. A live fish cake station completed the Bajan village street feel, as guests mingled against the backdrop of the heritage architecture of an 18^th century Barbadian town.

Crane guests enjoying The Village celebration

With a phased opening over the next several months, the 55,000 square-foot Crane Village is expected to become the new heart of the resort community.

The next stage of opening, within a few weeks, will reveal a 3,000 sq. ft Duty Free shopping centre in partnership with Duty Free Caribbean (Cave Sheperd, Pages Bookstore, and Ganzee) followed closely by The Town Hall, a state-of-the-art conference facility.

The Town Hall meeting and function space will offer a spectacular venue for conferences, receptions and private functions, featuring a view of the iconic Crane pool. This area will accommodate up to 150 guests, banquet-style.

Along with duty-free shopping, the Village will also feature resort wear at Dingolay, Barbadian art and crafts at Tamarind Seed, resort keepsakes at the Crane Signature Shop and a selection of fresh food, wine and convenience items at The General Store.

Later in the year, guests will also benefit from the variety of dining and entertainment options, such as D’Onofrio’s for Southern Italian fare, Pizza Terrace with al fresco dining, The Village Café for fresh bread and coffee, and Bar 1887 featuring Rum Shop Happy Hour with authentic Bajan Tapas.

Guests strolling through the cobble stone streets will notice the grandeur of Barbadian design captured throughout The Village, featuring elements of historical architecture, steep gable roofs, wooden shutters and ornate fretwork integrated with fine mahogany features, distinctive lime stonewalls and typical breezy verandahs; all surrounded by beautiful landscaped gardens.

Barbados' Minister of Tourism Richard Sealy and The Crane's Paul Doyle check out Colombian Emeralds

We were there last summer.  Fascinating to see this work in progress!  Read the blog post about the Synagogue here.

The current edition of the Reform Judaism magazine includes a fascinating article about the history and restoration of the Nidhe Israel (the Scattered of Israel) synagogue in Bridgetown, Barbados. The synagogue was established in 1654 by Sephardic Jews fleeing the Inquisition. They were joined in the 1660s by a number of Jewish families fleeing Recife, Brazil, where they were being persecuted by the Dutch. Sold in 1929 by the last surviving member of the original founders, the synagogue has now been restored and is now a Barbados protected site and an active synagogue. It houses a new interactive Jewish museum and a recently excavated mikveh, the oldest known in the Western Hemisphere.

The article chronicles the painstaking restoration project, which began in the 1960s and is still ongoing, since recent excavations of the parking lot unearthed the mikveh. The restorations included the adjacent cemetery, which holds crucial information for the reconstruction of the synagogue’s history, and details the efforts made to trace and recover the various ornaments and sacred objects that once belonged to the congregation:

Paul Altman also struggled to recover the synagogue’s eight brass chandeliers, which he traced to the Winterthur Museum in Delaware, the site of the former estate of Henry Francis DuPont. When he appealed to DuPont’s Jewish chairman and CEO, Irving Shapiro reiterated the museum curator’s rationale for denying the request: “If we were to return all our exhibits, we wouldn’t have a museum.” As a consolation, Shapiro told Altman, “We will let you copy them.” Altman pleaded with him, “If we copy them, why don’t we put the copies in the museum with a sign saying, ‘Originals returned by DuPont to the Nidhe Israel synagogue in Barbados.’ How often do you get an offer like that?” Still, Altman says, “It was a no go. The originals remain in the Winterthur and the facsimiles hang in Nidhe Israel.”

Altman had greater success in retrieving the mahogany representation of the Ten Commandments which had hung over the Torah ark. Lady Stella St. John, wife of the Barbados prime minister, had displayed the tablets above the swimming pool of Ilaro Court, their official residence, and graciously donated them back to the synagogue. As the Torah ark and reader’s desk no longer existed, Altman commissioned “a brilliant woodworker” to refabricate them in Barbados mahogany.

The article can be found at http://reformjudaismmag.org/Articles/index.cfm?id=1464