Jewish Genealogy Newsletter Archive

Since one of the reasons that many people travel to Jewish sites in central and eastern Europe is to find their family roots and "walk in the foosteps of their ancestors," I'm posting here the link to the archive page of the biweekly online Newsletter, "Nu? What's New?" of Avotaynu, the Jeweish genealogy magazine.

Each issue has a lot of information, tips, links, reports, etc. Much (if not most) fills the specific needs of family historians, but there are also items of general interest to the traveler.

5 Millionth visitor to Jewish Museum in Berlin

The Berlin newspaper Tagesspiegel reports that a 17-year-old highschool student, on a school trip, has become the 5 millionth visitor to the Jewish Museum in Berlin. According to the paper, Sarah-Denise Heellmanns was given a gift package and kosher gummy-bear candies.

The Museum opened in September 2001. Even before its formal opening, the empty building was a tourist draw because of its distinctive design by Daniel Libeskind. According to Tagesspiegel, it is the fifth most popular museum in Berlin, with 733,000 visitors in 2007 -- including 140,000 under the age of 18. (The Pergamon Museum hold the top spot with 1.3 million visitors). About two-thirds of visitors to the Jewish Museum come from outside of Germany.

According to a Museum Press Release

"a steady increase in visitor numbers has been sustained since 2004. In the first eight months of this year, around 515,000 people visited the Libeskind Building and the exhibitions on German-Jewish history, 8 % more than in the same period last year (visitor total in 2007: approx. 733,000).

"The Jewish Museum Berlin, whose zinc-coated building has long-since become established as one of the capital's landmarks, continues to belong to Berlin's greatest attractions and Germany's most frequented museums. The Museum is particularly popular with kids, teens, and twens: About every other visitor in 2007 was under 30 years old - a considerable number for a historical museum. The twens represent the largest visitor age group with 29 %. Almost every fifth visitor last year was under 18 (19 %). Young people often visit the Museum on school trips: Of the total number of over 7,000 tours booked in 2007, nearly two thirds (63 %) were for school groups."

Quick Trip to The Hague and Amsterdam

I'm just back from a quick trip over the weekend to The Hague and Amsterdam, where I was speaking to the board of the Jewish Humanitarian Fund, a foundation that gives grants to projects mainly in post-communist Europe.

I'd never been to The Hague before, and unfortunately I only had a little time to explore the city, which is the Dutch capital and a center of international human rights and other organizations.

Jewish history here goes back to the 17th century and there are a number of Jewish heritage sites in town.

I was only able to visit the Sephardic cemetery (which conveniently is located on the Scheveningseweg, just a brief walk from the hotel where my meeting was going on -- and just around the corner from the huge "Peace Palace" where the International Court of Justice is located and where on Sunday there was a crowd holding white balloons marking the U.N.'s International Day of Peace.)

My friend and colleague Michael Miller (who also was speaking to the Humanitarian Fund board) and I found the cemetery on the map and made our way to the entrance. The gate was locked, with a car packed just inside and it wasn't clear from the notice on the gate whether it would be possible to enter. But we knocked on the door next to the gate (which was marked with a mezuzah) and the man who lives there opened the gate and let us in.



Restored in the 1980s, the cemetery is a vast space surrounded by a red brick wall, and, as it typical for Sephardic cemeteries, the tombstones lie flat --I was told that the first graves were actually of Ashkenazic Jews, but the stones were laid flat in the Sephardic manner. (There are also a few upright stones in one section). Some are very crowded together. Most only bear the epitaph -- some in Spanish, some in Hebrew, some in Dutch. But some also bear carving -- a few with Cohen hands or Levite ewers; but we also so some with skulls and crossbones (similar but less elaborate than those in other Sephardic cemeteries in northern Europe, such as in Altona, Germany or Ouderkerk, Holland.) We found the tomb of a mohel with a small carving of a knife. (By the way -- this article, which I haven't seen yet, looks like an excellent source on cemetery imagery.)



The cemetery did not feature in the recent European Day of Jewish Culture, Sept. 7, but it did form one of the sites opened during the general Dutch day of monuments a week later. I was told that about 600 people visited it that day.

Francesco Spagnolo on European Day of Jewish Culture

I know I already have placed my friend Francesco Spagnolo's blog on my blog list, but I do recommend readers take a look at what he is writing this week. As I noted earlier, in my post from Siena, Francesco is an Italian musicologist who is now the director of research at the Magnes Museum in Berkeley, California.

He took part in a whole batch of events during the recent European Day of Jewish Culture in Italy and has begun posting reportage and reflections on his experiences. I met Francesco when I was beginning my research for Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe; I can't quite remember how I connected with him, but I do remember arriving at his apartment in Milan from Budapest, sitting down, and starting to talk, talk, talk. We don't, alas, see each other all that frequently any more because of geography, but we haven't stop talking. Skype is great!

Meeting of Poles Who Care for Jewish Heritage

The Associated Press runs an article reporting on the first conference of (non-Jewish) Poles who care for Jewish heritage, which was held this week in Zdunska Wola, Poland. The filmmaker Menachem Daum attended and said it was a great meeting -- lots of people in attendance. It's wonderful to hear that these people, who long have worked in isolation, are getting recognition. I look forward to staying in touch with some of them and following continued progress. It is particularly important and even urgent that their work be supported, as resources to maintain cemeteries and other Jewish heritage sites are so strapped. In Warsaw a couple of weeks ago, I met with Monika Krawczyk, the CEO of the Foundation for the Preservation of Poland's Jewish Heritage, and she painted a very pessimistic picture -- time is really running out to save some synagogues.


Catholic Poles take initiative to save Jewish cemeteries

By The Associated Press

Tags: Poland, Roman Catholic

About 30 Roman Catholic Poles have taken it upon themselves to preserve what they see as a unique and important aspect of their nation's history - the crooked and crumbling markers in Poland's neglected Jewish cemeteries.

Kamila Klauzinska, 35, has helped lead the grassroots efforts of a group of Poles who believe that preserving the nation's roughly 1,400 Jewish cemeteries is important to remembering and preserving a shared past.

"It's our common heritage, so how can we not try to save it?" Klauzinska said at a meeting this week of some 30 people involved in similar community efforts across the eastern European nation.

READ FULL STORY

WMF Jewish Heritage Program Grants

(Zamosc synagogue, 2006. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber)

The World Monuments Fund has announced four Jewish Heritage Program grants totaling $235,000. The funds go toward renovation, repair and preservation of three synagogues in east-central Europe as well as to preliminary planning for preservation of a former Yeshiva in Belarus.


(Choral Synagogue, Vilnius, 2006. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber)

$70,000 was awarded to the Choral Synagogue, in Vilnius, Lithuania. Built in 1903, it is the only surviving intact synagogue in Vilnius and still serves the needs of the small Jewish community there.


(Subotica Synagogue. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber)

The Art Nouveau synagogue in Subotica, Serbia, which has been undergoing fitful renovation for many years, was awarded $75,000. (Restoration of the synagogue has had its ups and downs....which I experienced when I was a board member of the SOS Synagogue foundation formed in 2001 to oversee and encourage the process. Putting in briefly, politics played a role.) Some of the history of the synagogue and restoration attempts can be seen on the SOS Synagogue web site, which I designed, but which has not been updated for some time.

The 17th-century synagogue in Zamosc, Poland, received $75,000. The Renaissance synagogue, part of the "ideal" planned city, was recently restituted to Jewish ownership after long being used as a library. It is managed by the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland, which has devised a revitaliation plan for the synagogue that is a centerpiece of its activities. Plans include creation there of a regional Jewish museum.

The Foundation's web site states: "The synagogue in Zamość was erected at the beginning of the 17th century in the late renaissance style. Originally it consisted of only one building. In the 17th century two low porches for women were added to the north and south elevations. The main building of the synagogue is surmounted by an attic, behind which a depressed roof is hidden. The vaults of the synagogue (both in the main hall and in the porches) are richly decorated with stucco work, very similar to the decorations in the main nave of the Zamość church. Both buildings were decorated in approximately same time and in both of them the same type of vault-decoration (the so-called Kalish-Lublin) was applied. In the eastern wall of the synagogue there is a 17th century stone Aron Ha-Kodesz (a niche were the Torah scroll is kept); it’s richly decorated frame is dated for the first half of the 17th century. The synagogue was last renovated during the period 1967-1972. Since that time no major works took place in the synagogue. "

In addition, the WMF granted $15,000 for conditions assessment and conservation planning for the former Volozin Yeshiva in Belarus. Founded in 1803, the Yeshiva was considered the progenitor of the Yeshiva system in eastern Europe. The grants were presented through the WMF's annual Jewish Heritage Program awards.

Pictures from Travnik Jewish Cemetery

As reported in an earlier post, the Travnik synagogue was demolished two weeks ago. Azra Nuhefendic, one of the concerned citizens who raised the alarm and tried to halt the demolition, has sent me photographs of the neglected Jewish cemetery in Travnik.

As Ivan Ceresnjes reported, "The Jewish cemetery in Travnik, founded in 1762, is outside of the town on the slope of one of the surrounding hills, bordering the Catholic cemetery. It is large, quite overgrown with vegetation, but in decent condition. In the center of the plot is a monument to those who perished in WWII. It is a concrete pedestal on which are positioned three tombstones, possibly among the oldest ones from the cemetery."

The photos I am posting here were taken by a local journalist, Stojan Milos. Ms Nuhefendic, his friend, authorized publication of them on this blog.

Jewish Culture Day in Turkey

The European Day of Jewish Culture took place Sept. 7, and reports are coming in about how events were celebrated around the continent. Turnout appears to have been high in many places.

The Turkish Daily News reports from Istanbul:

Tünel's music store-lined streets are rarely quiet. But walking through the area Sunday, one could hear some very unfamiliar sounds, from a klezmer, to a maftirim choir, to Hebrew love poetry for the land of Israel.This was less an invasion than a return. For this year's European Day of Jewish Culture, a celebration of Jewish traditions held in cities across Europe, became for Istanbul's Jews a re-creation of a time when they were a vital, even dominant, part of the area, and when it would not have been unusual in the Galata area to be guided from synagogue to synagogue by Hebrew chants.

READ FULL STORY

New Jewish Museum in Moscow?

According to Ha'aretz, "the world's largest Jewish museum" is to be built in Moscow. Construction is to begin in 2009 and be completed by 2011...

The building apparently is already there, renovated last year and already serving as a museum (after an early history as a bus depot.)

According to the article, "The German architectural firm Graft Labs will be in charge of renovation and expansion, and international design company Ralph Appelbaum Associates will head design. The building, which spans 9,000 square meters, will be enlarged by adding underground floors covering 15,000 square meters, making it the largest Jewish museum in the world."

Having following the slow and complex process of creating a Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw over the past 10 years and more, It all sounds pretty quick -- I wonder who is curating the exhibitions, which are supposed to "commemorate Russian-Jewish history and include galleries of Jewish art and Judaica. Another section will commemorate the Holocaust. Plans include the construction of a large library, a center for Judaic studies and conference rooms."

Funding is coming from the Russian Cultural Foundation, the Moscow Jewish community and Jewish philanthropists headed by the incredibly weathly businessman Lev Leviev.

More on Jewish Heritage in Poland

A new post on Sam Gruber's Jewish monuments blog reminds me that I forgot to point out in my previous post the first comprehensive inventory of Jewish heritage sites in Poland that Sam oversaw in the mid-1990s for the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad.

Jan Jagielski, who will be speaking on Jewish cemeteries at the conference next week in Zdunska Wola, and Lena Bergman, now director of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, directed and coordinated that survey, which was carried out through visits by about 40 researchers to nearly 1200 sites around the country.

I first met Jan when I lived in Warsaw in the early 1980s -- I was the correspondent then for United Press International. I got to know him as part of the so-called "Jewish Flying University," a semi-clandestine group of young Jews and non-Jews who were trying to teach themselves everything they could about Jewish culture, religion, traditions and even memory: things that essentially were taboo during most of the Communist era.