"Other European" videos

Mark Rubin has posted some videos showing early rehearsals of the Klezmer and Roma bands involved in the "Other Europeans" project sponsored by the Yiddish Summer Weimar, the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow and the KlezMORE Festival in Vienna. (And which I wrote about in my most recent Ruthless Cosmopolitan column.)

Mark plays tuba and bass in the Yiddish band. The videos shed fascinating light on the creative process as the two bands prepare similar but different/different but similar performance repertoire based on mainly Moldovan sources.

I'm posting a couple of them below, but you can access them all through Mark's youtube channel (click link above). He has also posted various other clips from Yiddish Summer Weimar.

Thanks, Mark!

New and Newish Websites on Czech Jewish Heritage

My friend David Kraus has put up a new web site on Jewish heritage in the Czech Republic. It's called "Vanished Tempels" and so far includes images takes from old postcards of pre-WW2 synagogues in Bohemia and Moravia.

It also includes a few other types of old postcards with Jewish themes and -- interestingly -- photos of some of the architects of synagogues, including Wilhelm Stiassny, one of the great designers of Moorish-style synagogues in central Europe, among them the Jubilee synagogue in Prague and the synagogue in Malacky, Slovakia, not far from Bratislava. (See my own 2006 picture of Malacky synagogue, now an art school and gallery, below)



David's site provides a link to an even bigger data base of old postcards on Jewish heritage around Europe, 1890-1930 So far, there are images of synagogues from about a score of countries, plus some other Judaica, including postcards of Jewish sporting clubs and events.



David's site also includes links to several other web sites with resources on currently existing Czech Jewish heritage. One is a database of information on current synagogue buildings in the Czech Republic, and another has information on Jewish cemeteries in the Czech Republic.

Both sites were put up by Jitka Oltova. Both are in Czech, but there are lots of pictures. (Below is a slide show of my own photos from several Jewish cemeteries in the Czech Republic.)



Another site David links to is also pretty fascinating. Called "Vanished Places After 1945" it is a data base, in Czech and German, with lots of articles and pictures, of destroyed built heritage, including several dozen synagogues.

Jewish Museum in Hohenems, Austria Revamped

I just received a copy of the thick new catalogue for the Jewish Museum in Hohenems, Austria, which reopened last year after a complete renovation and revamping of the permanent exhibition. The Museum, which was founded in 1991, now goes by the name "At Home: Diaspora." I haven't seen it yet -- but the catalogue is a more than 360-page collection of essays and photographs linking history, personal history, memoir and analysis.

Hohenems is in the far western corner of Austria, near the Swiss border -- a few years ago I wrote an article about the town and an exhibition at the Museum on cantorial super stars called "Kantormania" for the International Herald Tribune. It is the birthplace of one of 19th century Europe's biggest cantorial super stars, Solomon Sulzer, and the exhibit formed part of celebrations marking Sulzer's bicentennial .

"Sulzer was not only a cantor," Hanno Loewy, the director of the Museum, told me at the time. "He was a composer; he was a public figure; he was a teacher. He had his own school, he had his chorus. He led probably the best chorus in Vienna in the 19th century."

What's more, he added, "He was celebrated because of his wonderful voice by most of the celebrated musicians of his time, from Schubert to Liszt. They all came to the synagogue to listen to his voice." Not only that, Sulzer also became the center of a personality cult, to the point where admirers even copied his famous long-flowing hair style.

The Museum, on the other side of the country from Vienna, forms part of the cultural scene in the Lake Constance area, which also encompasses parts of Switzerland and Germany. It also has forged strong bonds with descendants of Hohenems Jews -- each year the town and museum host a gathering of Jews with links to the town. The first such gathering took place in 1998; this year it took place last weekend.

Wooden Synagogue in Latvia endangered

I missed the posting last month on Sam Gruber's blog about the wooden synagogue in Subate, a town in western Latvia, that is in danger of collapse, but it is important to spread this information, so I am linking to the post here.

This simple little synagogue, along with a score of others elsewhere in Latvia and Lithuania (maybe elsewhere?) are the only surviving examples of the sometimes magnificent wooden synagogues that one stood in eastern Europe. See a summary of Sergey Kratsov's Survey of Synagogues in Latvia for the Center for Jewish Art here.

In it, Sergey reports that out of 280 synagogues in Latvia before World War II, only 43 still exist. The good news is that the so-called Green Synagogue in Rezekne, the best-preserved of the country's wooden synagogues, is under "thorough conservation" sponsored by Latvian authorities and the World Monuments Fund.

New Ruthless Cosmopolitan Column

In my latest "Ruthless Cosmopolitan" column for JTA I write about "allosemitism" -- the concept that Jews are the perpetual "other". I describe this year's Yiddish Summer Weimar festival and also a summer exhibit at the Jewish Museum in Munich on "that certain Jewish something" that makes things and/or people Jewish.

The column can be seen at the JTA web site or at various other sites, including the Jerusalem Post.

I am aggregating all the columns on a Ruthless Cosmopolitan blog, where they can be subscribed to via RSS.


DOES A "CERTAIN JEWISH SOMETHING" REALLY SET JEWS APART?

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

WEIMAR, Germany (JTA) -- I learned a new word this summer -- "allosemitism."
Coined by a Polish-Jewish literary critic named Artur Sandauer, the term describes a concept with which I am quite familiar -- the idea of Jews as the perpetual "other."

Allosemitism can embrace both positive and negative feelings toward Jews -- everything, as the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman put it, "from love and respect to outright condemnation and genocidal hatred."

Read full story

Jewish Literature Festival in Rome

There's going to be a Festival of Jewish Literature in Rome next month -- Sept. 20-24.

The web site (so far) is only in Italian and the program is not up yet, but it includes a provisional list of invited writers.

Canadian Synagogue to be Part of Heritage Park

This isn't European Jewish heritage or travel -- but it's related, and pretty interesting. There are many "skansens" or open air village museums/heritage parks in Europe, where traditional buildings are gathered from various sites and reassembled to show vernacular architecture, etc. I don't know any that include a synagogue or other overtly Jewish component, except for one or two (notably the Village Museum in Sighet, Romania) that include a house or tavern once owned or lived in by Jews.

Details for this Canadian project can be found at the "Little Synagogue on the Prairie" web site.


A SYNAGOGUE LOST THEN FOUND

Jul. 31, 2008
RHONDA SPIVAK , THE JERUSALEM POST

Calgary's heritage park is soon to be the second in North America to display a restored pioneer synagogue that will teach visitors about Jewish religion and culture.

The idea was the brainchild of Irena Karshenbaum, a member of Calgary's Jewish community, who works for a small real-estate development company and is also a freelance writer.

"The only other synagogue I know of that exists in a historic park in North America is in San Diego," says Karshenbaum, who proposed her idea to the board of directors of Heritage Park.

"My initial proposal was to build a replica of a synagogue that we knew had existed in the Montefiore colony of Jewish immigrants who had settled in Alberta in 1910. We had a photo of the Montefiore synagogue, but assumed the building itself no longer actually existed."


Read the entire story

Slawatycze cemetery

Henry Gitelman, a descendent of Jews from Slawatycze, Poland, has informed me of an error in a posting I made in May about the rededication of the Jewish cemetery there. He writes that first massacre of Jews in the town took place in February 1940, not in 1939, and that the victims, who included his grandfather and uncle, were not "activists" but just ordinary people.

Mr. Gitelman is editing a history of the Slawatycze Jewish community, written by the late Michal Grynberg, to be called "Oh! Slawatycze, My Home...."

Thanks to him for this information.

Construction at Ukraine Jewish Cemetery Halted

From JTA:

A local construction firm will halt construction at the site of a Jewish cemetery in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine. Rabbi Shmuel Kaminetsky, Dnepropetrovsk's spiritual leader, told JTA that the agreement with ATB was reached this week on shutting down the building of a shopping mall, but he did not provide details of the discussions. Kaminetsky praised the company's head, Gennady Butkevich, for responding to the concerns of the Jewish community, Jewish.ru reported. The cemetery is no longer in use, but it contains gravesites of local Jews dating back to the 1930s.

read more here

Wroclaw

Well, this isn't exactly Jewish heritage travel, but it's travel -- here's the link to a travel story on Wroclaw I did for the International Herald Tribune. There is a slide show of photos with it.

I researched the story when I was in Wroclaw in June for the conference on Modern Jewish Culture at the university there -- see an earlier post for info on the city's White Stork Synagogue.