Jewish Cemetery in Slawatycze, Poland is Restored

Monika Krawczyk, the head of the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland, reports that the Jewish cemetery in the town of Slawatycze has been restored and will be rededicated at a ceremony May 19 that will be attended by descendants of Jews from the town now living in North America and Israel.

The project was joint-venture of the Slawatycze Landsmanschaft from the USA and Canada, the Warsaw Jewish Community and the Foundation. Work was carried out under the supervision of the Rabbinic Commission.

Slawatycze is a tow located on the eastern border of Poland. Jews settled there in the 17th century. In 1921 the town's population was 1864 persons - among them 902 Jews. In 1939 a group of Jewish activists were shot and killed by the Germans, then buried in the cemetery in a mass grave. The remaining Slawatycze Jews were transferred to a ghetto
in Miedzyrzecz in May 1942, and from there to Treblinka. Very few survived.

For 60 years after the end of the war, the cemetery was neglected and became almost invisible among the surrounding local fields and medows.

Monika reports that:

"In 2004 the initiative to restore and commemorate the cemetery was brought to the attention of the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland by Alan Metnik and Henry Gittleman who contacted other descendants of Jews and started the fundraising for the project. The Foundation was responsible for all logistics, construction and legal issues. In 2007 restoration was completed, the cemetery is now fenced, with memorial gate and plaque, grass is cut and looks presentable - although we are very sad for the tragedy of the Holocaust we are proud for the fact that the memory is preserved. At a rededication ceremony on 19th May 2008 we will proclaim the triumph of unbroken Jewish spirit among 50 landsmen coming from Canada, USA and Israel."

POLIN Portal to Jewish Heritage in Poland

The POLIN web portal to Jewish Heritage in Poland is growing by leaps and bounds. There are dozens of new photographs and video clips of Jewish heritage sites around Poland -- to date, about 270 sites are shown; the aim is to present online documentation of 1,200 places.

POLIN is a project of the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland.

Prince Charles and My New Book

Prince Charles of England was in Krakow at the end of April to open a new Jewish Community Center.... at the ceremony, he was presented a copy of my new book, Letters from Europe (and Elsewhere), by Malgosia Ornat, who, with her husband Wojtek, runs Austeria press, which published the book earlier this year.

Yiddish Summer Weimar Symposium

I've been invited to speak again at a symposium in July at the Yiddish Summer Weimar, an ambitious workshop/festival on Yiddish music and culture that takes place for about a month in Weimar, the Germany city more associated with Goethe, Schiller and a failed "Republic" than with East European Jewish traditions....

This year's Symposium July 12-14, and the Yiddish Summer as a whole, are dedicated to a project called "The Other Europeans" -- an intercultural dialogue exploring Yiddish and Roma music, culture and identity.

I'll be speaking about popular images of Jews and Yiddish culture in Europe, including stereotypes, cliches and kitsch. I'll discuss their inherent ambiguities in a world that straddles the Jewish and non-Jewish community and where stereotypes and shorthand often take the place of nuanced definitions.

As I noted in my last post, from LA -- 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. 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.

Jewish Kitsch/Kitschy Jews

My exploration of Jewish tourism and Jewish kitsch usually centers on what I find in Europe, and in particular eastern and central Europe. In my book Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe and elsewhere I've written about the Jewish knickknacks and sometimes unsetting Jewish trinkets you can find in Krakow, Prague, Kiev and elsewhere -- mainly places where few Jews live and where the main market for such keepsakes and imagery is non-Jewish.

I've also written about "the ambiguities inherent in the popular visual representation of Jews in a world that straddles the Jewish and non-Jewish community and where stereotypes and shorthand often take the place of nuanced definitions. 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. "

This all sprang vividly to mind today, the day before the eve of Passover, when I went with my father and brother to shop for Seder supplies in a Jewish neighborhood in Los Angeles. We went to the "Glatt Market" and a kosher fish store; Eilat Market and a seedy Kosher butcher shop with a broken screen door and miserable looking meat.

The nice man in the fish store (long black beard, thick black-framed glasses, large black head-cover) ground up the carp, pike and whitefish on the spot, and while he was doing so I took a few minutes to explore the Judaica shop just down the street.


The shop was filled with an almost indescribable array of kitsch, much of which would be considered extreme even anti-semitic stereotype if found on sale elsewhere. I zeroed in on a couple of items. One, a ceramic salt and pepper shaker combo, one shaker a figure of a dancing Jewish man, the other his dancing wife, both dressed in shtetl attire. A number of other items including an elaborate Seder plate with figurines decorating bowls for the ritual items, were clearly made by the same hand (or, rather, manufacturer) -- in China.... the salt and pepper shakers cost $15, but -- just as I could not bring myself to buy cowboy boots made in China a couple years ago in Texas, I simply could not buy Judaica made in China.

Among the other items that caught my eye were wooden figurines of Jewish musicians obviously imported from Poland -- they were not only musicians, but they "shockled" or bobbed their heads and even legs. One small one was left, and two big ones. The proprietress of the store, a Persian-Israeli, said she had one client who routinely bought up all the small ones....

Krakow Jewish Culture Festival Founder Receives Award

Janusz Makuch, the director and co-founder of the annual Festival of Jewish Culture in Krakow, Poland, has been presented one of Poland's highest civilian awards, the Poland Restituta medal. Polish President Lech Kaczynski presented Makuch with the award at a ceremony in Warsaw marking the 65th anniversary of the wartime Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

This year the Festival will take place June 28-July 6. The Preliminary Program is already online.

Plans to build on Jewish cemetery in Ukraine halted

JTA runs a brief story stating that the US Embassy intervention helped halt plans to build two high rises on the site of the Jewish cemetery in Vinnitza, Ukraine. See the story HERE.

More than 700 Jewish cemeteries (or sites of Jewish cemeteries) are scattered around Ukraine. I visited a number of them when researching the new edition of "Jewish Heritage Travel."

Most Jewish cemeteries in Ukraine are abandoned, and even those where there are Jewish communities are often very neglected. Many cemeteries have had their tombstones uprooted. The cemeteries in western Ukraine in particular are noted for the intricacy of their decorative carving. You can see some examples on my web site.

The most comprehensive list of Jewish cemeteries and other Jewish heritage sites in Ukraine is the downloadable survey overseen by the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad.

Video Interview with me in Krakow about Jewish heritage

Last summer, at the Festival of Jewish Culture in Krakow, I was interviewed for a project on the Festival that has now become an informative web site. Put together by Zach Rait, and sponsored by, among others, the Taube Foundation, it features photographs and film clips of many aspects of the Festival, as well as interviews with me and others -- ranging from Festival director Janusz Makuch to the late Chris Schwarz, who founded the Galicia Jewish Museum and, sadly, died only about a month after last year's Festival took place.

New video interview with me

Here's the second of two interviews I did in January for "Tracing Your Family Roots," a cable TV show near Washington DC. In it I talk about the changes I've seen over the past two decades regarding attitudes toward Jewish heritage sites in east-central Europe, in the condition of the sites on the ground, and in the development of Jewish heritage tourism as a niche market.

Links to Some Recent Developments

Here are links to some articles about recent Jewish Heritage developments.

BARBADOS. A MAJOR historical Jewish structure was recently uncovered
close to the synagogue in The City. University of the West Indies
students, led by doctoral candidate Michael Stoner, uncovered a mikvah
during an archaeological dig.
http://www.nationnews.com/story/306441874580391.php#

ISTANBUL. Quincentennial Foundation Museum of Turkish Jews.
http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/article.php?enewsid=99002

PORTSMOUTH. History lives on in restored synagogue in Portsmouth. The
former synagogue, which once had about 200 members, officially opens
today as a museum and cultural and community centery.
http://hamptonroads.com/2008/03/history-lives-restored-synagogue-portsmouth

VIENNA. Austrian archaeologists last week announced they had found the
earliest sign of Jewish habitation in Austria, in the form of a silver
pendant they found inside a third-century C.E. grave, which bears the
"Shma Yisrael" prayer.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/965077.html