MANDEANS (MANDAEANS) in the United States face some cultural challenges. The AP has an article on them. Excerpt:

The world's roughly 60,000 Mandaeans have been coming to the United States in small numbers for several decades. Surges occurred at the outbreak of the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s, after the Gulf War in the early 1990s and after the 2006 bombing of Iraq's al-Askari Mosque, which set off sectarian violence.

Now, an estimated quarter of the population is in refugee camps in Jordan and Syria, while 10,000 remain split between Iran and Iraq. The remainder are scattered from San Antonio to Sydney. Several thousand are thought to live in the U.S., according to Mandaean-American leaders, but no formal totals are kept.

Members of Mandaean organizations from across the globe are convening in Stockholm, Sweden, on Wednesday to discuss ways to keep their religion alive in the diaspora.

One of the focuses of the conference will be language. Linguistically, the Iraqi community has all but lost its connection to the spoken Aramaic dialect of its Mandaean forefathers.

Charles Haberl, director of the Middle East Studies Center at Rutgers University, said that while Arabic and German translations of Mandaean holy scripture are available, the young Mandaean-American community is cut off from its texts because most cannot read Iraqi Arabic even though they speak it.

"When you grow up as a Christian, you know the story of (Christianity). We can't even read the Ginze," the central Mandaean religious text, said Mais Mandwee, 21, of Kalamazoo. "It's a shame."

There is a push for English translations to be produced, which would be a good thing.