Seaghán Ó MurchúChen, I am sorry you did not get a reply from the synagogues when on holiday. I know that security is very tight and that was decades before the current unrest. Same as it ever was, on the other hand, when I visited Prague in 2004, for example, in the Jewish quarter (a must if you haven’t had the chance already in Czechia). That may be part of the reason for the reluctance to invite you, and as the norm in Europe is for Orthodox shuls, who long of course have gotten the unwanted attention we study here in these lessons. But I bet Chabad or a Hillel-type (not sure what they are called outside North America) campus-adjacent informal gathering might be more suited to you.
And maybe where you live, if not near borders with their own worries among their residents and their soldiers, there may be in larger cities families who’d love to invite you for a Shabbat meal or going to a household type of ‘pop-up shul’; I wrote about Chabad on this thread (hope you can see it) and they until recently only met at the rebbe’s house in the garage out back. So you might not know of their existence. In Ecuador, one Chabad had its organisation on the official website for the international map finder, but another (not sure if it’s messianic Christian but it does call itself ‘beit Chabad’) only showed up in a separate unofficial web search site. So that ambiguity may play a role in making it more difficult to seek out who’s part of the diaspora as Torah-true Jews.
