We win an award!

By Ruth Ellen Gruber


I've just be notified that this blog has been named one of the top 50 Jewish blogs by the Guide to Online Schools.

We scoured the web to find the best blogs pertaining to Judaism and came up with this list of 50. These blogs were selected because they demonstrate expertise and passion, are updated frequently, and provide a wealth of information and other resources. 

Guide to Online Schools

Top 50 Jewish Blogs

All over -- Other Europeans video by Mark Rubin

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Bassist/tuba player extraordinaire  Mark Rubin has posted a fantastic collection of his videos of the "Other Europeans" project, taken over the past three years in many places.

The band

is an international gathering of 14 leading klezmer (Yiddish) and lautari (Roma) musicians. Created and directed by Alan Bern, this new intercultural supergroup is creating powerful, deeply emotional and virtuosic music that restores a centuries-old cooperation between two groups who cohabited the same space in present-day Moldova before being torn apart by war, holocaust and immigration.

Bringing together some of the most distinguished soloists from seven countries, the Other Europeans Band is building new cultural relationships between two peoples who are often considered marginally European, but have played a major role in creating and transmitting European musical traditions.

Much has been said about the Jews and the Roma. Now musicians from both worlds have joined, researching and demystifying their connected cultures to create a new heritage, an exciting contribution to a shared new European and Cosmopolitan identity.

Budapest -- The Hanukkah Festival is on!

Tour guide Agi Antal leads a group to the Dohany St. synagogue in Budapest during the 2009 Hanukkah festival. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

I'm back in Budapest for Hanukkah again -- I arrived last night and plunged right in to events in this year's Quarter6Quarter7 Hanukkah festival, which takes place in the city's downtown old Jewish quarter (the 6th and 7th Districts). I wrote about last year's festival for JTA and the New York Times online.

My train from Prague was too late to catch the concert I wanted to hear of Shkayach, a group that sings updated versions of Israeli and traditional Jewish songs. The group's singer, Flora Polnauer, also fronts hip-hop klezmer fusion groups -- and she chanted the Rosh Hashanah service this year for a Budapest reform congregation.

But I did manage to catch the concert by the Polish Klezmer Jazz group, the Bester Quartet.

And afterwards, I had a drink with the festival's organizer, Adam Schonberger, at "M"  restaurant -- which is serving special menus during the festival. Last night there was a Sephardic menu; I had the fish empanadas with a orange and black olive salad.

Adam told me that he is experimenting with the festival format this year. Instead of having concerts, performance, openings and other events for the full eight days of Hanukkah, as last year, the last four days are devoted to a film festival.

One of the innovations this year is a downloadable Jewish quarter tour guide app for smart phones -- more on this after I take a look at it. So far it's just in Hungarian, but an English version is coming.

As last year, though, more than 30 local venues and businesses in the 6th and 7th district are involved in the festival, hosting events or providing programs.

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

Austria -- parliament approves funding for Jewish cemeteries

Jewish cemetery, Eisenstadt, Austria. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

The AP reports that the Austrian Parliament has approved €20 million euros for the restoration and upkeep of the more than 60 Jewish cemeteries around the country. As I reported at the time, the funds were initially pledged last December.

The bill foresees annual government payments of €1 million ($1.4 million) into a special fund over the next 20 years. The country's Jewish community will supplement the government's contributions each year through €1 million in donations.

The measure, which takes effect in 2011, also asks local municipalities where such cemeteries are located to maintain them for at least 20 years after they have been restored.

 The Austrian Jewish Community web site has an extensive page listing all the cemeteries and giving their history, size, location, condition and notes on any current or recent restoration efforts.

Poland -- New director at Galicia Jewish Museum

The ground-breaking Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow's Jewish quarter, Kazimierz, has appointed a new director, Kazimierz-born Jakub Nowakowski. Nowakowski has worked at the museum since 2005, most recently as its education direction. He will replace  Kate Craddy who has returned to England, to take up an appointment at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in Birmingham. Craddy herself became director after the death in 2007 of the museum's founder, the British photographer Chris Schwarz. The museum's core exhibition is formed by Chris's photographs of Jewish heritage sites, taken mainly in the 1990s -- they also form the basis for the book Recovering Traces of Memory, with text by Jonathan Webber.

Nowakowski has an MA in History from the Department of Jewish Studies at the Jagiellonian University, as well as a postgraduate diploma in Management and Marketing from the Kraków School of Economics and Computer Science.  He also holds a Tour Leader’s Licence from the City of Kraków.

Krakow --Cheder Cafe

There's an ever-growing number of venues in Krakow's old Jewish quarter Kazimierz where you can  eat, drink, hangout.... and they have expanded far beyond the Jewish-style cafes that first began appearing on Szeroka St. 18 years ago....Only a fraction of the venues are now "Jewish" or "Jewish-style." The Krakow Post highlights one of the latest in this grouping -- the Cheder cafe, an offshoot of the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow, which opened about three years ago in a former prayer room in the High Synagogue complex.

Conceived as something more than just a hangout with a Middle Eastern feel to it, Cheder (pronounced “headair”) also serves as a cultural and educational centre – perhaps no surprise given that this is an offshoot of the Jewish Culture Festival Association.

On entering the venue, guests are enveloped by a soothing ambiance - especially so for those who enjoy cosy, library-like surroundings. This comparison is not random – high wooden shelves with ornamental carvings in the shapes of Hebrew letters (which form a lion – symbol of Jerusalem and Jewish culture) are heavy with books, and guests are welcome to browse amongst them. Other Jewish ornaments are discreetly placed in such surprising spots as coat racks or a menora-shaped lamp embedded in the wall. This distinctive design, along with matching Oriental, yet kitsch-free music, made me want to linger a little longer.

France -- Festival (and stereotypes?)

 

Poster for Jazz 'n' Klezmer festival

► ◄

I've just posted a link to the 9th edition of the Jazz 'n' Klezmer festival in Paris, which takes place Nov. 21-Dec. 13, with some big names taking part -- David Krakauer, Balkan Beat Box, etc.

What I find interesting are the iconic stereotypes used in the poster (see above) -- a sexy Black woman to symbolize jazz and a (sort of sexy) beardless Hasid to symbolize klezmer.....

Romania/Ukraine/Moldova -- New Book by Simon Geissbuehler

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

The Swiss diplomat Simon Geissbuehler, who has just completed a posting in Bucharest (and moved on to a new one in Warsaw), has published another book on Jewish traces in Eastern Europe. This one is called "Like Shells on a Shore: Synagogues and Jewish Cemeteries of Northern Moldavia" -- it is a slim monograph, essentially a travelogue that  documents journeys that Simon took through neighboring parts of today's northern Romania, Ukraine and Moldova, mostly in an area demarcated by the Siret and Dniester rivers. An abbreviated account can be viewed online HERE.

Simon documents the Jewish sites her finds in the region, mainly synagogues and Jewish cemeteries, but he also gives thoughtful views on the nature of heritage, Jewish heritage and memory in these places -- memory that is fast receding if not already extinguished. He reluctantly concludes that there is little will or desire there to remember the destroyed Jewish world preserve its physical relics.

The most striking places that Simon documents in his book are the huge abandoned Jewish cemetery outside the remote village of Vadul Raskov, Moldova on the bank of the Dniester -- also documented in words and images in the Moldova Impressions blog

Photo: Moldova Impressions blog

 

-- and the ruins of a magnificent 18th century synagogue at Raskov,  just across the river, in the self-proclaimed state of Transnistria.

Photo by Sergey Bulanov, at http://www.panoramio.com/photo/11876585

New York/Poland -- Early Jewish Heritage Travel (1930s) exhibit in New York

 

 Intro video for the exhibit, posted on YouTube

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

What looks like a wonderful and fascinating exhibit on Jewish heritage travel in the early 20th century has opened at the Yeshiva University Museum in New York. The title of the exhibit says it all:  16mm Postcards: Home Movies of American Jewish Visitors to 1930s Poland.

The exhibit

brings to life the landscape and people in Poland through the amateur movies of immigrant American Jews who traveled “back home” to visit their families, friends, and former communities in the 1920s and 1930s.  Intended to be viewed by family and fellow landsmen (friends from the Old Country), these films offer a rare, intimate and—quite literally—moving picture of Jewish families, towns and society in pre-World War II Poland. This exhibition was developed in collaboration with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and in cooperation with the Center for Jewish History.

The films can be seen at the Center for Jewish History web site.

Adam Kirsch writes in Tablet Magazine that the exhibit

demonstrates how different things were in the early 20th century, when the ancestors of most American Jews came here from Eastern Europe. This extraordinary show consists of home movies—all silent, mostly fragmentary—taken by American Jews who visited their relatives in Poland in the 1930s. (Many of the films can be seen at the exhibition’s website.) What makes these films so powerful is their extreme rarity: It was only a small handful of Jews who had the wherewithal, and the desire, to go back to the villages they had left behind decades earlier. And the encounters they document show how drastically the fates of American and Polish Jewry had diverged by the 1930s. In many films, we see the American cousin, prosperous and dressed in a Western suit, standing next to his poor, bearded, caftanned relatives; and it is impossible not to wonder what must have been going on in their minds and hearts.

Did the American cousin, clutching his camera like a badge of modernity, give thanks that he had been rescued from ancestral poverty and anti-Semitism—or did he feel nostalgia for the Jewish world from which he was cut off? Did the Polish cousin envy his American relative, or resent his intrusion, or long for his help? The pathos is infinitely greater, of course, because the viewer knows that all these Polish Jews—old and young, men and women and children—are just a few years away from the Holocaust. Virtually none of the people we see in these home movies was alive 10 years later. Because of the Holocaust, the natural growing-apart of the Old Country and the New World became an irreparable break, and a source of permanent guilt. Jews who came to America lived and flourished, while those who remained behind suffered and died: How can such a gulf ever be crossed?

The questions that “16 mm Postcards” raises, silently and by implication, are addressed head-on in a new book that might serve as a companion to the exhibition: The Glatstein Chronicles (Yale University Press). This is the title given by the volume’s editor, Ruth Wisse, to two novellas published by the great Yiddish writer Jacob Glatstein in the late 1930s, based on his own pilgrimage to the Alte Heym. Glatstein was born in Lublin in 1896 and came to New York in 1914. After working for a time in sweatshops, he established himself as a Yiddish journalist, while writing poetry that brought the influence of Joyce, Eliot, and Pound to bear on Yiddish literature. “The term experimentation,” Wisse writes in her introduction, “hardly suffices to describe the many subjects that Glatstein addresses, the poses he adopts, and the poetic variations he attempts.”