Moldova -- Survey of Jewish Heritage Sites is Now Online

Ruined synagogue, Vadul Rashkov. Photo: U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

The first and most complete survey of Jewish heritage sites in Moldova has been published online on the website of the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad. It includes synagogue buildings, Jewish cemeteries, Holocaust memorials and sites of mass burials, Jewish communal buildings and other sites.

The survey was carried out by Igor Teper, and Sam Gruber, who oversaw the survey, carries a long report on the process -- with lots of pictures -- on his blog.

Few countries in Central and Eastern Europe have as rich a Jewish history and collection of Jewish history sites as small Moldova, nestled in between Romania and Ukraine. Long a crossroads of cultures, modern Moldova today, however, is little known and rarely mentioned. Jewish communities and Jewish heritage sites in neighboring countries garner more attention and more tourists, though most of the Jewish sites in the region are starved for funds for basic maintenance, let alone restoration. Seven years ago the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage, of which I was Research Director, teamed with the Joint Distribution Committee to identify, document and survey as many Jewish historical and Holocaust-related sites as possible within a year.

 Sam also posts his introduction to the Survey -- a summary of the history of Jewish sites in Moldova, as well as the typology of sites and their condition.

Prior to the Holocaust, the area that is present-day Moldova was home to a thriving Jewish culture that built and maintained a large number of community buildings for religious, educational, and charitable purposes. In addition, there were many Jewish cemeteries throughout the country serving Jewish communities. The second half of the 19th and the early 20th centuries witnessed the greatest growth of organized Jewish institutions and that is the period from which most surviving buildings date. These include synagogues and community buildings such as schools, hospitals, and old age homes. Some of these institutional buildings are the Jewish sites that have survived best because the facilities have been most easily adapted and reused by successor institutions, often providing services similar to the original.

The destruction wrought during the Holocaust, when German and Romanian occupiers destroyed many synagogues and other Jewish sites, was severe. Further destruction continued during the nearly half century of Soviet rule when scores of buildings were either demolished outright, or were destroyed over time by neglect; and when hundreds of buildings were confiscated by the state and adapted to new uses. It is only in the past several years that efforts have begun to identify all these sites. One important reason is to negotiate the return of many community properties to the Jewish community, or to arrange for proper financial compensation for many others which are not easily returned.

 My friend, the Swiss diplomat Simon Geissbuhler, has written about some of these places in his book "Like Shells on a Shore: Synagogues and Jewish Cemeteries of Northern Moldavia."

Bob Cohen posted a wonderful description on his Dumneazu blog about going home to his ancestral shtetls, Telenesti and Orhei.

Jewish cemetery, Telenesti. Photo; U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad

Christian Science Monitor Article on Jewish Heritage

Check out Michael J. Jordan's article in the Christian Science Monitor about the issue of caring for Jewish hertiage in Europe. Michael sat in on some of the sessions at the March seminar on Jewish heritage in Bratislava, but the story runs as an advancer before this weekend's Holocaust Assets conference in Prague.

Bratislava, Slovakia - For architectural historian Maros Borsky, the story begins five years ago.

He was documenting the synagogues of Slovakia, which, like the rest of post-Holocaust Eastern Europe, saw its countryside depopulated of Jews, with most provincial synagogues abandoned. Slovakia itself has seen a war-time community of 137,000 shrink to some 3,000 Jews today, with only five of 100-plus synagogues functioning.

In the course of his work, Mr. Borsky came across a donor who wanted to renovate a rural synagogue. But which one?

"I realized it's important to create an audience for these synagogues, for Jews, non-Jews, locals, and tourists to learn there once was a community here – and what happened to it," he says.

The result of Borsky's work, the "Slovak Jewish Heritage Route" will soon connect 23 restored synagogues.

The Slovak project will be just one of scores discussed this weekend in Prague as representatives from 49 countries convene for the landmark Holocaust-Era Assets Conference. The agenda ranges from charting the progress made in returning Nazi-looted artwork and restituting Jewish property to caring for elderly survivors of the camps.

Read full article

Belaus -- Pictures of Luban Synagogue Being Demolished

Sam Gruber has posted a series of pictures, forwarded by Dovid Katz in Vilnius, showing the actual demolition of the synagogue in Luban, Belarus (which I wrote about in earlier posts). Here is one of them:



Writes Sam:

Can this be a wake-up call for better policies in Belarus and elsewhere? This was not a derelict building. It was not a ruined. It was not a forgotten site. It was sacrificed to the demands of contemporary development pressures where expediency and short term gain (to the public tax rolls or to a local politician's campaign war chest or private account) mean more than protecting history and architecture. No community in the world is immune to these pressures. Nor should every old building be saved. But there needs to be in place - in every community - procedures that allow time for review and reflection, and time for world to get out that a building is imperiled.

Italy/New York -- Sam Gruber to speak on Venice Jewish history

For those of you in New York, Sam Gruber, the president of the International Survey of Jewish Monuments (ISJM), will be speaking in New York May 7 on the "prehistory" of the Venice Ghetto.

The lecture will be at the Colony Club in New York on Thursday, May 7th, at 6:30 pm, followed by cocktails. Tickets are $40 and must be purchased in advance from Save Venice. Mail checks to 15 East 74th Street, New York, NY 10021.

Its not a talk about the Ghetto per se, but of the social, political and topographical background of Venice in the late 15th and early 16th century that encouraged the Ghetto's creation.

For full information click HERE

Belarus -- More on Luban Synagogue Destruction

On his Jewish arts and monuments blog, Sam Gruber has posted more detailed information about the demolition of the historic former synagogue in Luban, Belarus -- as well as pictures of what he rightly describes as an "impressive vernacular building." The wooden synagogue, built in the 19th century, is being demolished to make way for some sort of commercial development.

Former Luban synagogue, c. 2005 -- photo courtesy of the Jewish Heritage Research Group in Belarus

Sam writes that according to Yuri Dorn of the Jewish Heritage Research Group in Belarus:

the Luban authorities did not inform Belarus Jewish community about planned demolition. He did not speculate why, but presumably they were either ignorant of the need to do so, or of any likely interest in the fate of the building, or they suspected that if word got out that their would be complaint. Based on my long experience in historic preservation I would assume the worst, and that is the reason for the rush to demolish, so that any protest will be too late. In 2004, the Jewish Community of Belarus tried unsuccessfully to include the Luban Synagogue building on the official registry of landmarks, but was unable to do so because of insufficient archival documentation about the building's history. Presumably it was deemed eligible on architectural grounds alone.

Sam also includes a picture of the English/Russian/Hebrew commemorative plaque on the building.

Poland -- Wooden Synagogus anniversary

Nextbook.org recently published Sam Gruber's article marking the 50th anniversary of the landmark book Wooden Synagogues by Maria and Kazimierz Piechotka.

Fifty years ago this year, two young Polish architects published a book that would change the face of American synagogue architecture. Maria and Kazimierz Piechotka, both survivors of the Warsaw Uprising and German labor camps, collected and interpreted studies made before the war of the wooden synagogues that once dotted Eastern Europe. Most of the surveys were taken by people who died in the Holocaust, and all of the centuries-old buildings went up in flames. But much of the documentation pertaining to their architecture survived. The Piechotkas used this material, which included photographs, measurements, and descriptions, to recreate the destroyed buildings in their book Wooden Synagogues. Published in Polish in 1957 and released in English in 1959, the book revealed a lost world of interior spaces, shapes, and decorations, tremendously varied, expressive, and exciting—and all made of wood.

From 1959 to 1989, the Piechtokas, living in Warsaw, were severely restricted in what they could publish about Jewish art, despite the material they continued to gather and additional insight they might have offered. Thus, Wooden Synagogues became a sort of message in a bottle, sent out into the world on its own.

Read Full Article and See Pictures

One of my first and most intensive journeys tracing Jewish heritage sites was a trip with the Piechotkas through eastern Poland in May 1990.... Sam and his wife, Judy, and I traveled with Maria and Maciej to -- if I remember correctly -- 19 synagogue buildings in all states of repair and disrepair. (We also visited some sites on our own.) The trip opened my eyes to the extent, beauty and power of what survived of Jewish heritage in eastern Europe, and it formed the basis for much of the Poland chapter in the first edition of Jewish Heritage Travel.

Spain -- Yet More on Toledo (and Other Grave Controversies)

Here's a link to Sam Gruber's recent lengthy post on the situation regarding the medieval Jewish cemetery in Toledo, Spain, on which I posted a JTA story earlier today -- for some reason (holiday party-going, perhaps?) I did not see Sam's article when it was posted a few days ago.

Sam added today a long essay on recent controversies over moving graves. Read it by clicking HERE.

Playing with Stereotypes -- Brokeback Dreidel

In addition to this Jewish Heritage blog, I maintain a blog on the Imaginary Wild West.

This video -- "Brokeback Dreidel" -- encompasses both:



"Brokeback Dreidel" is a delight -- as Ari Davidow said on his Klezmer Shack blog, it raises the bar on funny Hanukkah videos. It also shows how stereotypes (gay, Jewish, cowboy and otherwise) can have different meanings (and elicit different responses) in different contexts. (I love how the line dancing turns into a hora...)

If you look closely, you will see one (or maybe more) of the singers in the video wearing a (kosher) cowboy hat with fake sidelocks that is remarkably similar to the hats with fake sidelocks provided at the Golden Rose "Jewish" cafe in L'viv for patrons to try on and joke with.



Sam Gruber has written a thoughtful (and angry) blog post about the selling of Jews and Jewish symbols. He writes:

Its one thing when Gene Wilder plays a rabbi and dons payes in The Frisco Kid – a funny film that actually is both an affirmation of Judaism and a historic corrective – since there were plenty of Jews who helped shape the American West. And the case can be made for Barbara Streisand dressing up as Yentl. But it is quite another thing when an Ukrainian café owner encourages customers to dress up as Hasids to laugh and eat and drink on the very site the Lviv’s destroyed Beth Midrash, in the shadow of the ruined Golden Rose Synagogue, whose worshipers were rounded up an murdered. No matter what one thinks of the strictures of the Hasidim, the place of their death is no place for caricature. There is no one to answer back.

I wrote about how Jewish stereotypes and Jewish jokes mean different things in different contexts in an essay published in 2005 (in German translation) in the book Gerüchete über die Juden. Antisemitismus, Philosemitismus und aktuelle Verschwörungstheorien (Essen: Klartext Verlag) edited by Hanno Lowy, the director of the Jewish Museum in Hohenems, Austria.

In the essay, I described how I own several miniature figurines of Jews -- two marzipan "Yeshiva bochers" that I bought at a kosher pastry shop in Budapest, and a tiny "Jew" clutching a coin that was given out as a sort of party favor to guests at the "Jewish style" Anatewka restaurant in Lodz, Poland. The figures all are caricaturish, but the bochers were destined for an internal (Jewish) market, and the little Jewish man was destined for mainly non-Jewish (Polish) consumers.

Boundaries between insider and outsider, believer and non-believer, devotee and ironic observer can sharply delineate the differences between kitsch and caricature, art and artifice, stereotype and homage. But perspectives shift, and the boundaries often blur. The images and their meaning are often decidedly in the eye of the beholder. And they are frequently dictated by changing religious realities, philo-Semitic, often engineered nostalgia, and the powerful exigencies of the marketplace.

Many of the markers identified with Jewishness have religious overtones that have long laid the basis for both anti-Semitic stereotypes and nostalgic yearning for the "authentic" Jewish experience of the East European shtetl.

Signs and symbols of Jewish holidays and domestic observance, and the beards, side curls, black hats, yarmulkas, fringes and other outward trappings of the traditional orthodox or Chasidic Jew spell "Jewish" -- even to Jews -- in a way that, for example, the physical attributes of Jews such as the actress Natalie Portman or the actor Kirk Douglas do not. A case in point is a T-shirt sold online at the www.judaicaheaven.com web site. It features the slogan "Don't Worry, Be Jewish" under a big yellow "smiley face" that is topped by a kippah and long, dangling earlocks. The image, the web site states "shows off Jewish pride." Likewise, I was told recently by a friend that when the Chabad Lubavitch Chasidic movement set up a stand at Budapest's huge annual "Sziget" music festival a couple years ago, its display included a life-sized figure of a Chasid, with a hole cut where the face should be. Visitors could insert their own faces into the image and have themselves photographed in full Chasidic regalia, that is, as a "Jew."

Read the Full Essay

Where does "Brokeback Dreidel" fit in? It's a gay, wild west parody of a Jewish song, loaded with layer upon layer of pop-culture reference....to Brokeback Mountain and beyond. The audience is clearly not all Jewish -- nor it is all gay. But they are all clearly "in the know." (The group also parodies other songs, including "Jingle Bells" and 1980s ABBA hits...). The parody is American, in an American pop culture scene where -- as Sam put it -- there is so much real Judaism, and so much reliable information about Jews is available. But it's also an American scene where parody, gay, Jewish, self- or otherwise, is something of a way of life.

Ukraine -- Link to Historic Pictures from Zhovkva

Sam Gruber has posted several historic pictures of the synagogue in Zhovkva, which were provided to him by Sergey Kravtsov.

The pictures show the synagogue under destruction during WW2 and also interior shots, including the highly decorated ark.

By contrast, here is a picture of how the ark looks today, which I took in Zhovkva last week: