Photo gallery: Beautiful but Desolate Kerepesi Jewish cemetery in Budapest

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

(This post also appears on my En Route blog for the LA Jewish Journal)


In Budapest earlier this month, I visited the Jewish cemetery on Salgotarjan street, which was founded in 1874 and is the oldest Jewish cemetery in the Pest side of Budapest.

It is actually the Jewish section of the city’s Kerepesi monumental cemetery, where national heroes are buried — and is the final resting place of many wealthy and influential Hungarian Jews of the time. Massive family tombs of Jewish noble families and industrialists line the perimeter; but there are also the graves of ordinary people. There is also a section where Holocaust victims are buried.

I had not been there in years -- despite some efforts at clean-up some time back, the cemetery is more densely overgrown than ever and tragically neglected, and I was glad that a friend came with me, as I do not like wandering around there by myself. There used to be a lot of stories of homeless people camping down there, or others coming in to rob the graves. Once I was startled to flush out a pheasant. There is decent security now, though, and a responsible young caretaker (who tied up his dogs when we arrived).

Still, many of the huge tombs of families who once wielded social, political and financial power are literally crumbling; collapsing and being swallowed by vines and other vegetation. Some of them have been broken open: you can even see the coffins in the crypts.

Quite a few of the tombs are the work of leading architects of the day — such as Ignác Alpár, Sándor Fellner, Albert Körössy, Emil Vidor and Béla Lajta. Lajta, whose work prefigured art deco, also designed the entry way from the street and the massive Ceremonial Hall (now roofless), built around 1908.

I posted a gallery of photos on www.jewish-heritage-europe.eu, the web site that I coordinate for the Rothschild Foundation Europe.

Here are just a few of them  (all photos © Ruth Ellen Gruber) -- click here over to Jewish Heritage Europe to see the full selection.

Click to see more pictures   

Jewish Heritage Europe October newsletter is online

In a grand family tomb in the vast Kozma utca Jewish cemetery in Budapest

The Jewish Heritage Europe Newsletter for October went out last week….

This issue focuses on important completed synagogue restoration projects in several countries -- Spain, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Lithuania -- plus other news highlights from around the continent that have been featured in recent weeks on Jewish Heritage Europe, the web site that I coordinate as a project of the Rothschild Foundation Europe.

There is also a link to the JHE Photo Galleries, a growing collection of galleries where many new images have been posted...Take a look -- one of the new galleries celebrates Simchat Torah with a series of images of decorated Arks from synagogues around Europe.

Ark in synagogue in Roman, Romania

You may submit your own photos to add to the galleries.

Click here to see the Newsletter in your browser -- better still,  sign up for automatic monthly delivery that will link you to a fascinating selection of updates and images from all around Europe.

There's a lot going on -- synagogue restorations, clean-ups of Jewish cemeteries, exhibition openings, guided tours, Jewish culture festivals -- and more.

You can also receive more frequent news by subscribing to the almost-daily newsfeed (blog) using the box on the the JHE home page.


Thanks!

New tourism app for Jewish Basel, Switzerland

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

This also appears on my En Route blog for the LA Jewish Journal

Going to Basel, Switzerland and interested in Jewish life and heritage?

Then you'll want to get a new app for smartphones and tablets that is officially being launched on August 26.

Called "Baleph," the app is designed for both IOS and Android platforms and is in English and German.

It leads the user on a "stroll through Basel's Jewish history" via a 13-stop, multimedia walking tour that highlights Jewish history in the city from the middle ages to the present. Featuring  text, sound, and images, an Interactive timeline, and a city map with GPS function, it contains 65 minutes of audio material covering a tour lasting 1 ½ to 2 hours.

Here are the links:

iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/baleph/id895724718?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D4

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.merianstiftung.baleph&hl=en

Website: www.baleph.ch

This past week's updates from Jewish Heritage Europe

Murals of the Holy Land from Beit Tefilah Benjamin in Chernivtsi, Ukraine. Photo © Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

As I did last weekend, I'm posting here this past week's updates from www.jewish-heritage-europe.eu, the web site that I coordinate as a project of the Rothschild Foundation Europe. There's news from Ukraine, Hungary, Romania, Serbia, Italy and the UK....

I post on the JHE newsfeed several times a week, to keep content dynamic on what we aim to make the go-to web site for Jewish heritage issues in Europe. JHE will celebrate two years online next month, and we are planning to expand the enhance the site with new features.

Meanwhile -- please subscribe to the JHE news feed! You can use the subscribe buttons on the home page or on any of the news pages. The deal is that, on days that I post on the JHE news feed, you will receive one email with the links to the posts. Easy, convenient and informative, no? And you won't miss any of the feed.

Look at all the news we've run this past week:

Plans for Holocaust Museum in Budapest prompt debate 

My article about a complex situation, published in Tablet Magazine

Lublin: Exhibition of photographs of Jewish cemeteries

Call for applications: fellowship at Center for Urban History in Lviv

Niš Jewish cemetery: new signage, possibility to visit

Great news, thanks to the indefatigable Jasna Ciric

Launch of online catalogue of Romanian archives

Rich new resource

New digital uploads of old synagogue postcards from the Rosenthall collection

Fantastic images and great resource -- for the armchair traveler, too

Technology: 3d scanners help digitize weathered inscriptions

Science in action to benefit historic research!

Update: Bradford Synagogue received first tranche of lottery funding for restoration

A shining example of Jewish-Muslim cooperation

“Visions of the Holy Land” in northern Romanian synagogues

Explanation of beautiful murals that decorate synagogues

Hotel to open in famed former Polish Yeshiva building

Entry of former Yeshiva building, showing Hotel Ilan sign as well as sign noting its former identity. Photo: Hotel Ilan/Jewish Community Warsaw

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Care to spend the night in the building that once housed one of pre-Holocaust Poland's most famous and influential yeshivas?

From October you'll be able to do so, when the four-star Hotel Ilan opens in the huge building in Lublin, Poland, that once housed the Yeshivat Chachmei Lublin, founded in 1930 by Rabbi Yehuda Meyer Shapiro.

According to the Hotel's web site and Facebook page, the new hotel will include 44 rooms, four suites, a restaurant called Olive that will feature Jewish cuisine, a lobby bar, a conference center and a spa/welness center. Its logo includes the slogan “feel the tradition.”

The building is owned by the Warsaw Jewish Community, which will run the hotel. (The community already runs a guest house, Beitenu, located in the former synagogue in Kazimierz Dolny.) That synagogue was used as a movie house after World War II and was restituted to Jewish ownership in 2002. The Beitenu complex  also includes a Jewish museum, Judaica and kosher shop, and a cafe.

The Yeshiva function in Lublin only until 1939. After World War II, the enormous building became part of the Lublin medical school. It was returned to Jewish ownership in 2004, and parts of it have been renovated to include a synagogue, mikvah and Jewish communal offices as well as exhibition space.

Jewish travel writer extraordinaire Ben Frank featured

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

This post also appears on my En Route blog for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal


Ben G. Frank is one of the most prolific -- and well-traveled -- writers about Jewish sights, sites, communities, attractions and travels worldwide.

Huffington Post runs a lengthy interview/conversation with him, conducted by Bernard Starr, sparked Frank's most recent book, The Scattered Tribe: Traveling the Diaspora from Cuba to India to Tahiti & Beyond (Globe Pequot Press, 2011).

Frank's curiosity about this extraordinary phenomenon of the Diaspora sparked his mission to find and visit remote and isolated -- sometimes forgotten -- Jewish communities in surprising locations. As a travel writer with a passion for Jewish history, Ben Frank is the perfect person to have undertaken the task. He eventually visited 89 Jewish communities. I interviewed him to learn more about his fascinating journey.

When did you first get the urge to undertake this demanding adventure? Did you have concerns about the difficulties you might face in remote locations?

It all began in 1964 on a trip to Algeria. As a reporter/journalist, I was fascinated by the emigration of Jews from that war-torn country to France, where they were guaranteed the rights and privileges of French citizens, since, according to the Cremieux Decree, they too were French. When I landed I met with the last few Jewish residents in Algiers. They called themselves "le Dernier Carre," the last unit in Napoleon's army to stand in battle and defend themselves in the form of a square.

How did you find out about these scattered wandering Jews?

In the case of Algeria, I contacted organizations, such as the Joint Distribution Committee, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, and others who follow and aid Jews in the Diaspora. I discovered that Jews were scattered globally, including concentrations in Asia and South America. Jews have lived in India, for instance, for 2,000 years and they are still there. With contacts and research tools, I located them. 

Read the full article

Smartphone App for Oshpitzin/Oswiecim

A version of post also appears on my En Route blog for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

The latest Jewish travel app for smartphones and tablets takes you to a place that no longer exists except in memory: Oshpitzin.

Oshpitzin was the Jewish name for Oswiecim, the small town in southern Poland where the Nazis built Auschwitz which had a majority Jewish population before the Holocaust -- I’ve written a lot about the town and its difficulty in balancing its Holocaust identity with its pre-WW2 past, starting in the mid 1990s, when I dealt with the issue in the long chapter “Snowbound in Auschwitz” in my book Upon the Doorposts of Thy House: Jewish Life in East-Central Europe, Yesterday and Today, which was a sort of diary and meditation on nearly four days blocked in Oswiecim by a freak snowfall…...

Last year, the Auschwitz Jewish Center—a prayer, study and research center in Oswiecim—launched a project aimed at putting Oshpitzin back on the map. It started with a printed guidebook and followed on withan interactive web site, www.ospitzin.pl, that includes a map, pictures, history, testimonies and more.

Now, the Center as followed through with a smartphone App that can be used by armchair travelers as well as actual visitors to the town. It has an interactive map, videos, audio, photographs, etc.

Most of the sites the project—be it the guide book, the web site or the App—describes no longer exist. But it all entails a way to learn about the Jewish history (and general history) of a town that existed for hundreds of years before “Auschwtiz” changed its identity from a place of Jewish life into a place of Jewish murder.

As of now, the App is available in the iTunes store for IPhone and IPad—but it will soon be available on Android, too.

Jewish Travel goes Academic......

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Scholars at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania are analyzing Jewish travel in a fellowship program called "On the Road: Travel in Jewish History." Robert Leiter writes about the program in The Jewish Exponent. He reports that there were about 170 applications, which were whittled down to 12 scholars for the first semester and 14 for the second, now under way. (Full disclosure -- I applied for a fellowship but was not accepted.)

Travel as ennobling -- an educational pursuit that broadens knowledge and sharpens perceptions -- is a 20th century concept, according to German-born scholar Martin Jacobs. [...] 

Jacobs joined Ora Limor of the Open University in Jerusalem and Joshua Levinson of Jerusalem's Hebrew University, who first broached the topic, in fashioning the proposal they eventually presented to David Ruderman, the head of the center. [...] 

Two scholars who consider modern-day notions of Jewish travel are Jackie Feldman, a native New Yorker who now lectures on social anthropology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev; and Nils Roemer, a non-Jew born in Germany, who teaches Jewish subjects at the University of Texas in Dallas.

Ukraine -- Shtetl trippin'

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

The JTA's young correspondent Alex Weisler, who just finished a 6-month stint roving in Europe, has written a pair of stories about his whirlwind visit to his ancestral shtetl, Shatsk, in Ukraine, as well as on Jewish heritage travel in Ukraine in general -- from the perspective of a non-Jewish guide, Alex Dunai.

For me and my family, Shatsk has always seemed like an impossibly exotic travel destination. I found it hard to believe that, as the Ukrainian census informed me, about 6,000 people lived there. Or that it had a nightclub called Sinatra and several ATMs.

But somehow, you can drive to Shatsk -- and you don't even need a souped-up DeLorean. After just four hours on roads whose quality varied from poor to middling to dear-God-is-this-a-road, my mother, our guide and I had traded the comparatively cosmopolitan Lviv -- which was feverishly preparing for the 2012 European soccer championship -- for the dusty roads of Shatsk, which lay dormant in the absence of summer's rush of tourists. [...]

For 22 years, I had wondered what Shatsk meant for me. Was it a living, breathing place? Or just the graveyard of my family's past? Was it some hell my family had escaped from? Or the bucolic paradise they spent decades in America pining after?

I'm aware of the challenges that come with heritage tourism. I spent 36 hours in Shatsk. Who is to say I've learned anything substantive about a place to which I parachute in, hunt around for some information and snap a few photos? How can I be sure that my newfound connection to Ukraine and my long-lost relatives is something more than fetishizing the past and longing for an idealized Shatsk that may have never existed?

But if heritage tourism is an imperfect science, it's an important one. As a Jew in New York, it's easy to lose sight of history -- to view the past as a neat arc that started at Ellis Island, paused on a stoop in Brooklyn and triumphantly culminated in the green pastures of Westchester County or Long Island. If we consider the Old Country at all, it’s of a sanitized variety: Pop "Fiddler on the Roof" in the DVD player, rinse and repeat.

It  reminds me of the article I wrote for UPI many years ago when I first visited my own ancestral town on my father's side, Radauti. 

My first visit to Radauti, at the grave of my great-grandmother

And of the various other such stories I've written for other publications, including a JTA story on a more recent visit to Radauti. Here's the of the story I wrote for JTA about visiting Kalvarija, my ancestral town on my mother's side....

December 16, 1999
Ten Years After the Wall
Memories of lost family are conjured when walking in footsteps of the past

By Ruth E. Gruber


On a frosty November morning, I walked around the two massive, ruined synagogues that form a unique surviving Jewish complex in Kalvarija, a small, sleepy town in southern Lithuania near the border with Poland.

One of the synagogues was built in the early 18th century. Its roof had fallen in and its bottom windows were bricked up, but it was possible to see arches and other architectural detail and decoration.

The other, built in about 1803, was more or less intact, but crumbling. Between the two stood a red brick building, a former rabbi's house and a cheder, or Jewish school, with a big Star of David above the door.

As I have done in hundreds of other cities, towns and villages in more than a dozen countries, I took pictures of the synagogues from every angle.

With my eye focused through my camera, I didn't watch where I was walking. Suddenly, I tripped over a broken brick, half buried in the uneven yard, and went crashing to the ground.

Trying to save my cameras, I ended up twisting my ankle so that I could hardly walk.

The injury took weeks to heal fully, but everyone told me that my spill was beshert -- fated -- and maybe it was.

Kalvarija is the town from which my great-grandfather, Pesach Susnitsky, emigrated some 120 years ago, ending up in the small town of Brenham, Texas.

In Brenham, Pesach became Philip. He was the patriarch of a huge family of children, including my grandmother, who was born in Brenham, and a pious pillar of the Jewish community.

In Brenham, he helped found a Jewish congregation. The little wooden synagogue that was built in 1894 still stands.

When he left Kalvarija in about 1880, Jews made up more than 80 percent of the town's population. By 1939, it had dropped to about 25 percent, but still about 1,000 Jews lived in the town.

No Jews live there today, and I must say that given the depressing and bloody history of the town and region during World Wars I and II, and decades of later Soviet domination, I am enormously thankful that my great-grandfather had the courage to leave when he did.

Still, the buildings I was photographing were not just fascinating sites of Jewish heritage in general: they were the places where my ancestors worshiped and studied.

The streets of the town, with their small, mainly low wooden houses, and the central square dominated by a big, white church with two ornate towers, were the streets and square where my ancestors walked.

I had driven there with a friend after spending the night near the Polish town of Suwalki, about 20 miles to the south. Until a few years ago, such a day trip from Poland to Kalvarija would have been difficult if not impossible.

For one thing, American citizens today do not need a visa to enter Lithuania. While Kalvarija is the first town in Lithuania across the border from Poland, the border crossing-point was opened only four years ago.

I didn't have a real genealogical agenda for my visit -- I just wanted to see the town. But I had hoped to spend much of the day walking through the quiet streets, poking into corners and possibly talking to local people.

My injured ankle cramped my capabilities, though -- and here's where beshert comes in.

An old woman told us where the Jewish cemetery was located, on the other side of the little Sheshupa River that winds through the town, and my friend and I decided to drive straight there.

Pesach Susnitsky died in Texas in 1939 at the age of 83. Several years ago, I visited his grave in the Jewish cemetery in Brenham.

I had little hope of finding any Susnitsky graves in Kalvarija, but I was eager to visit the cemetery just to see it.

We found a small, fenced-in, triangular plot of ground right in front of a huge electric grid, which contained several dozen simple tombstones, some of them toppled.

Hobbling, I starting photographing the site. Just then an old man came by, wheeling a bicycle.

"I know everything, everything," he smiled. All his teeth were capped in gold. "I remember everything how it was."

He propped up his bike and began to talk. He described how the cemetery used to extend much, much further, stone after stone, all the way down to the river, but the Germans destroyed it, and most remaining stones were stolen.

Now on top of the area, there are ugly, poor barracks where people live -- with no indoor plumbing, they have to walk 50 yards or so to toilets. Pigs and dogs frolic around. A man passed by leading a cow.

Of the remaining graves, the only mausoleum, he said, was that of a certain Menashe who was a "millionaire."

I asked the old man if he remembered the Susnitsky family -- and he did.

"Of course! There were a lot of Susnitskys here, a lot." Particularly, he said, before the war, there were two Susnitsky brothers in town, Alter and Yankel, who must have been nephews or great-nephews of Pesach. "Alter was a big, tall man," he said. "Yankel was small, curved over and had a hunch back." He demonstrated, scooping out his own body.

The brothers lived together in a big house on a hill, he said -- and then he led us there to see it. Indeed, it was one of the most imposing wooden houses in the village. Undergoing some renovation, it even sported a satellite dish.

Both brothers were killed when the Germans deported the Jews to nearby Mariampole during World War II, he told us.

The old man said all the houses on this street were occupied by Jews, and that Jews lived all over the town. "So many, so many!" He gestured forlornly.

He was clearly nostalgic for past times -- and the disappearance of the Jewish community represented for him a change for the worse. Nonetheless, in describing the Jews in town, he used the Polish term Zydek or "little Jew" -- a term Jews regard as pejorative.

The Jews in Kalvarija were "good people," and "wealthy," the man said, they took care of each other and everyone got on with everyone.

"They were called Yankele, Alterke, Menashe, Meyshke," he recalled. "They would say, 'Oy vey, oy vey.'"

Ukraine -- Report on a Jewish Heritage Tour

Ohel containing tomb of the Baal Shem Tov in Medzhybizh. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

As I am currently compiling up to date information on Jewish heritage sites in Ukraine and other European countries, I was pleased to come across an article by Yoram Dori, a senior advisor to Israeli President Shimon Peres, describing a Jewish heritage tour in Ukraine preceding participation in the Limmud cultural/educational event in Odessa. Dori traveled with Chaim Chesler, the founder and chair of the executive of Limmud FSU, Dan Brown, founder and editor of the eJewish Philanthropy website, Natan Roi, editor of the Jewish Agency’s Hebrew website, and Edvard Doks, a travel guide and Ukrainian correspondent for Yediot Aharonot.

His article focuses on the fact that few if any of the Jewish heritage sites they visited bore mezuzahs or plaques or other signs indicating their history and origianl purpose -- and issues that has loomed large across former-Communist Europe since public interest in Jewish heritage began evolving in the late 1980s.

Ver is di mezuzah? (“Where is the mezuzah?”) was the question at the heart of our tour of various Jewish sites in Ukraine, preceding the recent Limmud FSU festival in Odessa. [. . .]

For me, by the way, everything is clear. When I get home I will try to find a solution at least to the missing plaques. Maybe by an appeal to the president of Ukraine who is due to visit Israel shortly. To allow hundred years of Jewish history to disappear without trace is just not acceptable.

Their stops included Zhitomir, Berdichev, Vinnitsa, Medzhybizh, and Uman.  (Except for Vinnitsa, I covered all these sites in Jewish Heritage Travel.)

Jewish cemetery, Berdichev. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Nice article in the Forward on overlooked Jewish heritage sites

Wonderful carved stone in Siret. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Michael Luongo has a nice wrapup in The Forward about the "Top 10 Overlooked Jewish Heritage Sites From Around the Globe." It's called "Forgotten History." And thanks, Mike for mentioning this blog!

When most of us think of Jewish heritage travel, places like Jerusalem or the Warsaw Ghetto come to mind. Yet, from the pre-Inquisition sites that dot Spain, to farming villages in South America, hundreds of forgotten or under-visited Jewish sites exist across the world. When we put out the call for recommendations of our readers’ favorite overlooked sites on the Forward’s Shmooze blog and Facebook page, we got a global range of answers. Not surprising, most of the suggestions were about Eastern Europe. From your recommendations and my own travels, here’s an informal list of the top 10 Jewish sites often overlooked by traveler

Read more: http://forward.com/articles/138890/#ixzz1PvK2lPPF

The sites on the list range from Europe, to Latin America to New Zealand.....

It's always hard for me to choose a favorite or "best" or "most overlooked" site -- but I nominated my beloved Jewish cemeteries and painted synagogues in northern Romania and western Ukraine.

Italy -- Article on Pitigliano

Entering the old Jewish quarter. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

The Vancouver Sun runs an article by Amy Stone about Pitigliano, the one-time "Little Jerusalem" in southern Tuscany -- and my choice for possibly the alltime most stunning Italian hill town (see my own article posted here a few months ago).

In the ghetto (indistinguishable today from the rest of the old city), the synagogue and its underground maze with an oven for baking matzo (unleavened Passover bread), the remains of the mikvah ritual bath, a kosher butcher, and “cantina” for pressing and storing kosher wine preserve the Jewish past. A small museum is a new addition.

An elegant and curvaceous Italian beauty, the synagogue was built in 1598 and lovingly restored in the 1990s. Its rounded wooden lectern and carved pews have been meticulously reconstructed, along with the grey-and-white marble floor. Spidery chandeliers hang from the ceiling.

Miraculously, in the 1960s, when walls of the abandoned building collapsed into the ravine, the women’s gallery survived. Once again visitors can climb the stairs for the female eye view of the synagogue through the elaborately carved wooden screen.

One of only three Jews still living in Pitigliano, Elena Servi is the spirit behind what remains of Jewish life. The last matzo was baked in 1939, and the last Yom Kippur service was held 20 years later.

Lithuania -- Jewish heritage trip being organized

Vilnius synagogue. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber


A roots-oriented Jewish Heritage trip to Lithuania is being organized this July. Here's the info:

JEWISH HERITAGE TRIP TO LITHUANIA

JULY 5 TO JULY 15, 2011

We will be visiting Lithuania this summer, would you like to come with us?

We have been planning trips to Lithuanian for groups of people interested in their Jewish heritage for 18 years. In addition to visiting Vilnius and Kaunas, we will have two days for individual roots tours.

Our main purpose in planning these trips is to offer Jews an opportunity to go back to their roots, to encourage them to research their ancestors, and to enable them to see the latest efforts being made to keep Judaism alive in Lithuania. Since profit is not the main motive, all arrangements are made in a first class manner intended to make the trip enjoyable and meaningful for all.

Prior to the trip, we will inform you of the do’s and don’ts - what to wear, what to take with, what to leave home, and many other little tips that help make the trip an enjoyable one. While this is a group trip, we try as much as possible to make it a personal trip, tailored to individual needs.

Please respond to - LitvakTrip@gmail.com

Peggy Freedman
8335 Berkley Ridge
Atlanta, GA 30350 USA

Howard Margol
4430 Mt. Paran Pkwy NW,
Atlanta, GA 30327-3747 USA
Email - homargol@aol.com

Belarus -- Chagall's memory, officialdom and Vitebsk

Tablet Magazine runs an article by Judith Matloff about how authorities in Belarus have exalted Marc Chagall to a local hero in his native town, Vitebsk. The article quotes me briefly noting how newly independent countries have seized on various figures (Jewish and non) with a sometimes very loose relationship to the place where they were born as local heroes. I had mentioned to the author the case of Slovakia, where John Dopyera, the inventor of the dobro (resonator guitar) had immigrated to the United States with his family as a teenager. Dopyera was long described as a Czech or Soviet, and it was only in 1989 that his Slovak origin was rediscovered. Enthusiasts set up a Dobrofest, and I believe that even a Slovak postage stamp was issued in Dopyera's honor.

In the context of this post (and the Chagall article) I want to highlight again, as I have done previously on this blog, the work being carried out by the Jewish Heritage Research Group in Belarus. Click this link for their web page on Vitebsk.

Favorite Son -- Belarus embraces Chagall but leaves his Jewishness at the door

By Judith Matloff | Oct 14, 2010

In Belarus, Europe’s last Communist-style dictatorship, tourism is not a big business. So I was intrigued to see busloads of sightseers roll through the city of Vitebsk during a recent visit there. Their destination, as it happened, was a trail paying homage to the country’s most famous native son, painter Marc Chagall. In a burst of nationalism, the country’s culture czars are eager to set the record straight that the 20th century’s most recognizable Jewish artist was not Russian, as commonly believed. They also realize that they can cash in on his name.

The glorification is such that Vitebsk, his birthplace, remembers Chagall with no fewer than three bronze statues in his image–a rare honor for anyone here other than Lenin. A day is set aside each year to pay homage to the modernist pioneer, with open-air celebrations including everything from international scholars to live goats like those featured in his work. Tourist attractions include the art school that Chagall founded in 1919 and a museum made up of the modest brick house where he grew up and exhibition space for some 300 of his works. The collection may not be as impressive as the one housed at the Chagall Museum in Nice, France, but the crowds here seem enthusiastic enough, judging from all the leggy women who sprawled on the statues for snapshots.
Lionizing the artist, says the Vitebsk museum’s director, Ludmila Khmelnitskaya, has been a way to assert national identity since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The Belarusian language is now taught at schools and, as a recent gas dispute with Russia showed, the government chafes when Moscow tries to boss it around. According to Khmelnitskaya, most Belarusians had never heard of Chagall before the museum opened in 1992, but the number of visitors it attracts has grown to 20,000 a year.

“It’s important to return his memory to the culture of Belarus,” Khmelnitskaya said, adding that Soviet encyclopedias listed him as from France, where he spent the bulk of his later years. His name was absent from histories of Belarusian art. “Chagall’s work reflects his memory of the city, yet he’s been neglected in the country where he was born.”

The embrace of Chagall, an outcast Jew under the Soviets, is not unusual for young states in Eastern Europe, said Ruth Ellen Gruber, an authority on Jewish heritage travel. In Slovakia, the 19th-century rabbi known as the Chatam Sofer is being heralded as a national historic figure alongside non-Jewish notables. His tomb is on the list of tourist sites. “Newly independent countries—and especially newly independent countries trying to assert their national identity—look for local heroes, prominent figures they can claim as their own and who can set them apart from countries that once dominated them,” Gruber said.

Read full article at tabletmag.org

Article on upcoming Jewish cultural events

The The New York Jewish Week has a nice article by Hilary Larson previewing some upcoming Jewish culture festivals and other events in Europe. (You can see an expanding list of festivals in the sidebar of this blog).

throughout the chilly days of fall, cities across North-Central Europe host Jewish cultural festivals that go beyond mere street fairs to showcase finely curated klezmer, cinema and more.

As airfares drop and drab afternoons shorten, consider planning travel around these cultural events. A trip immersed in klezmer or Yiddish theater, say, will be more memorable than another tour of castles.
For aficionados of all things Yiddish, the 14th annual Week of Yiddish Music and Theater in Dresden, Germany, will take place from Oct. 17-31. Concerts, plays, lectures, and even Yiddish linguistics classes all explore the lingering influence of Yiddish in contemporary culture. The festival’s musical highlights include songs of the shtetl performed by a broad range of musical artists, from Yachad, a Russian-Ukrainian group, to Anakronic Okestra, which sets traditional klezmer tunes to hip-hop for an evening of dancing.

In addition to performances, the festival offers opportunities for visitors to engage with the local Jewish community, which is once again flourishing. Community Shabbat worship is held at Dresden’s award-winning New Synagogue; a guided tour of the synagogue is also on the program. There are also several café afternoons, when visitors can mingle over traditional German-Jewish cake with Dresden Jewish residents. (On that note, don’t be intimidated by the fact that lectures and discussions, as well as most festival websites, are in German: most urban Germans also speak English, music is universal, and Google’s Translate tool can help you figure out the website program schedules.)