Ukraine -- Virtual History and Reconstruction of Golden Rose Synagogue in L'viv

I want to draw attention to the online presentation about the Turey Zahav, or Golden Rose, synagogue in L'viv, prepared by my friend Sergey Kravtsov and others at the Center for Jewish Art in Jerusalem and posted on the Center's web site.

Not only does the presentation give a history of the synagogue, which was destroyed in WW2 and remains in ruins, but it includes a virtual reconstruction of it -- layer by layer, renovation/reconstruction by renovation, showing how the building changed over time.

It also presents the building, originally constructed in the late 16th century, in the context of other synagogues and monumental buildings of the time in what is now western Ukraine, and provides information on the architects who designed and built them.

Florence -- Haggling in the Synagogue

Florence Synagogue. Photo (c) R. E. Gruber

I had an experience last week that threw into even sharper relief the contradictions of caricature and irony found in the insider vs outsider use of Jewish stereotypes.

I was in Florence for a very interesting and wide-ranging conference on representations of Jews in European popular culture, organized by young scholars at the European University Institute in nearby Fiesole.

Before the official start of the conference, a group of us visited Florence's synagogue and the Jewish museum housed in its women's gallery. The synagogue is a stately Moorish-style structure with an ornate interior and towering green dome. A grandiose symbol of Jewish emancipation, it was designed by the architects Marco Treves, Mariano Falcini and Vincenzo Micheli and inaugurated in 1882.

The Jewish museum is on two levels -- the lower level is mainly a display of Judaica. The upper level was revamped and reopened last year as a multi-media history exhibit using objects, panels, sound and projected images to tell the story of the Jewish community in Florence.

Florence Jewish Museum. Photo (c) R. E. Gruber

After visiting the museum, I stopped in the gift shop (I love museum gift shops.) It's small, but has a lot on offer -- jewelry, ritual objects, stationery, etc. All seemed rather expensive, but, with Hanukkah gifts on my mind, I found a nice little pair of earrings for €15.

I wanted to get another piece, apparently made by the same designer. The saleswoman showed me a pendant -- for €20.

I didn't want to spend that much, I told her. Her response was immediate. "What would you like to pay? How much do you want to spend?"

Well, the earrings were only €15 -- I didn't want to spend more than that.

"OK -- €15 -- the pendant is yours!"

Damn, I thought. She gave me 1/4 off, just like that. I could have got it for less!

Then I thought about the last place I had come into contact with a reference to bargaining in a Jewish context -- the "At the Golden Rose" cafe in L'viv, where no prices were put on the menu so that patrons could haggle ("like Jews") as to what they would pay...

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As for the conference -- I will try to write something on it later. For now, you can see the program by clicking HERE.

Germany -- Forgotten Jewish Modernist Architects and Their Creations

Here's a link to a terrific web site about Jewish modernist architects in Germany and their work, linked to a publication as the Pentagram Papers 37. It's based on the work of the late Haifa-born architect and scholar Myra Warhaftig, who published extensive material about them in her book, German Jewish Architects Before and After 1933: The Lexicon.

Little is known anymore about the more than 450 Jewish architects who were active in Germany before 1933 -- in November of that year, Jews were banned from the state-run artists guild, membership in which was mandatory in order for an architect to work. The web site examines 43 of them, providing biographical information and posting pictures of some of their buildings, many of which are still standing.

Another web site devoted to these architects also arranges walking tours to some of their buildings.

Warhaftig died in March at the age of 78 - see her obituary here, and also an article in Nextbook.org.

“The Jewish architect wanted to show his achievement in the forefront, and to create a new form of building that people would accept,” she told the author of the article, David Sokol.

“Berlin was a living architecture exhibition,” Warhaftig said of the interwar period. “After Weimar, Berlin was flourishing culturally. Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and other modernists were looking for a peaceful and social world, and wished to express their ideas in architecture. I think the majority of Jewish architects chose to settle in Berlin to prove that anti-Semitism would no longer play a role in their lives.”

Jewish architects were active in the modernist movement in many countries.

In the interwar period several synagogues were designed or remodeled in the modernist style by Jewish or non-Jewish architects.

These include the synagogue currently in use in Brno, Czech Republic (designed by Otto Eisler in the 1930s - you can read my article about modernist architecture in Brno in general by clicking here), that in Zilina, Slovakia (built in 1929-1931 and designed by the Berlin architect Peter Behrens), the remodeled synagogue in the Smichov district of Prague (built in 1863, remodeled in modernist/Functionalist style in 1931 by Leopold Ehrmann), and the synagogue currently in use in Rijeka, Croatia (built in 1928 and designed by Gyozo Angyal and Pietro Fabbro).

Synagogue in Smichov district of Prague, 2008. Now the archive of the Prague Jewish Museum. Photo (c) R. E. Gruber

Amsterdam -- No More Anne Frank Apartment

I just checked the web site that was advertising an "Anne Frank apartment" where you could "live like Anne Frank" (and which I wrote about on this blog and in a Ruthless Cosmopolitan column).... the site still advertises the apartment, but I'm happy to report that it no longer is named after Anne Frank, nor does it use its tasteless advertising come-on....

Moldova -- The "Other Europeans" project on the road

Several of the Jewish members of "The Other Europeans" project are in Moldova, traveling around the country to explore the lautari musical tradition.

I'm not on the trip -- but Bob Cohen is writing about it, with photos, on his blog -- he has posted some striking photographs of some of the Jewish traces in the town of Edinets, including its Jewish cemetery.

The Other Europeans project, directed by Alan Bern, is an intercultural dialogue exploring Yiddish and Roma music, culture and identity. It joins together Roma and Yiddish musicians -- they are exploring how music stemming from the same general place (mainly Moldova) is transformed by two parallel but related traditions.

I posted some material on the project this summer -- I took part in a symposium held at the start of the annual Yiddish Summer Weimar festival, and I heard the initial concerts by the two music groups, at Weimar and at the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow.

Playing with Stereotypes -- Brokeback Dreidel

In addition to this Jewish Heritage blog, I maintain a blog on the Imaginary Wild West.

This video -- "Brokeback Dreidel" -- encompasses both:



"Brokeback Dreidel" is a delight -- as Ari Davidow said on his Klezmer Shack blog, it raises the bar on funny Hanukkah videos. It also shows how stereotypes (gay, Jewish, cowboy and otherwise) can have different meanings (and elicit different responses) in different contexts. (I love how the line dancing turns into a hora...)

If you look closely, you will see one (or maybe more) of the singers in the video wearing a (kosher) cowboy hat with fake sidelocks that is remarkably similar to the hats with fake sidelocks provided at the Golden Rose "Jewish" cafe in L'viv for patrons to try on and joke with.



Sam Gruber has written a thoughtful (and angry) blog post about the selling of Jews and Jewish symbols. He writes:

Its one thing when Gene Wilder plays a rabbi and dons payes in The Frisco Kid – a funny film that actually is both an affirmation of Judaism and a historic corrective – since there were plenty of Jews who helped shape the American West. And the case can be made for Barbara Streisand dressing up as Yentl. But it is quite another thing when an Ukrainian café owner encourages customers to dress up as Hasids to laugh and eat and drink on the very site the Lviv’s destroyed Beth Midrash, in the shadow of the ruined Golden Rose Synagogue, whose worshipers were rounded up an murdered. No matter what one thinks of the strictures of the Hasidim, the place of their death is no place for caricature. There is no one to answer back.

I wrote about how Jewish stereotypes and Jewish jokes mean different things in different contexts in an essay published in 2005 (in German translation) in the book Gerüchete über die Juden. Antisemitismus, Philosemitismus und aktuelle Verschwörungstheorien (Essen: Klartext Verlag) edited by Hanno Lowy, the director of the Jewish Museum in Hohenems, Austria.

In the essay, I described how I own several miniature figurines of Jews -- two marzipan "Yeshiva bochers" that I bought at a kosher pastry shop in Budapest, and a tiny "Jew" clutching a coin that was given out as a sort of party favor to guests at the "Jewish style" Anatewka restaurant in Lodz, Poland. The figures all are caricaturish, but the bochers were destined for an internal (Jewish) market, and the little Jewish man was destined for mainly non-Jewish (Polish) consumers.

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.

Many of the markers identified with Jewishness have religious overtones that have long laid the basis for both anti-Semitic stereotypes and nostalgic yearning for the "authentic" Jewish experience of the East European shtetl.

Signs and symbols of Jewish holidays and domestic observance, and the beards, side curls, black hats, yarmulkas, fringes and other outward trappings of the traditional orthodox or Chasidic Jew spell "Jewish" -- even to Jews -- in a way that, for example, the physical attributes of Jews such as the actress Natalie Portman or the actor Kirk Douglas do not. A case in point is a T-shirt sold online at the www.judaicaheaven.com web site. It features the slogan "Don't Worry, Be Jewish" under a big yellow "smiley face" that is topped by a kippah and long, dangling earlocks. The image, the web site states "shows off Jewish pride." Likewise, I was told recently by a friend that when the Chabad Lubavitch Chasidic movement set up a stand at Budapest's huge annual "Sziget" music festival a couple years ago, its display included a life-sized figure of a Chasid, with a hole cut where the face should be. Visitors could insert their own faces into the image and have themselves photographed in full Chasidic regalia, that is, as a "Jew."

Read the Full Essay

Where does "Brokeback Dreidel" fit in? It's a gay, wild west parody of a Jewish song, loaded with layer upon layer of pop-culture reference....to Brokeback Mountain and beyond. The audience is clearly not all Jewish -- nor it is all gay. But they are all clearly "in the know." (The group also parodies other songs, including "Jingle Bells" and 1980s ABBA hits...). The parody is American, in an American pop culture scene where -- as Sam put it -- there is so much real Judaism, and so much reliable information about Jews is available. But it's also an American scene where parody, gay, Jewish, self- or otherwise, is something of a way of life.

Bartholomew's Notes on Christian Philo-Semitism

In a link to my recent posting about the Anne Frank apartment and to my Ruthless Cosmopolitan column, in which I mention the "virtually Jewish" scene in Krakow, L'viv and elsewhere, the Bartholomew's Notes on Religion blog links to a previous post that describes philo-Semitism and the use of Jewish symbols, "products" etc, by Christians in the U.S. and elsewhere. In it, Richard Bartholomew speaks of

a whole subculture of American Christians for whom Judeo-philia goes far beyond simple Christian Zionism.

This means

selling items associated with Jewish culture to Christians: shofars, mezuzahs, menorahs (engraved with a Star of David merged with a Christian “ichthus” sign), Kiddush cups, tambourines (”mentioned in Psalms”) and, in particular, Tallit prayer shawls

The phenomena have a lot of outward similarities. But at heart, what I was describing (i.e. the "Jewish cafe" and tourism scene in mainly Jew-less, post-Holocaust, post-Communist Europe) is quite different, as, in large part, there is little -- if any -- actual religious identification involved by now. The virtually Jewish scene as a whole in Europe does encompass people who were drawn by their sense of religious or spiritual connection, and I go into these aspects in my book Virtually Jewish Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe.

It would be very interesting to carry out a more in depth investigation into the reasons that non-Jewish customers are now drawn to the Jewish-style cafe scene, to see how much of the motivation comes from religious or spiritual interest. The "Please Respond" public art project carried out this past summer by the anthropologist Erica Lehrer, Stephanie Rowden, and graphic designer Hannah Smotrich may contribute to an understanding of this.

I have only recently come across the Bartholomew's Notes blog. But it turns out that Richard Bartholomew and I actually have been published together -- we both contributed chapter-essays to the 2005 book Gerüchte über die Juden Antisemitismus, Philosemitismus und aktuelle Verschwörungstheorien, (Klartext Verlag: Essen), edited by Hanno Lowy, the director of the Jewish Museum in Hohenems, Austria. Bartholomew's essay was on Christian Zionism; mine was on Jewish Kitsch and Kitschy Jews.

, pp. 235-254 (Translated from my unpublished English text, “‘A Curiously Cold Affection‘: Christian Zionism, Philo-Semitism and ‘The Jew’”).

My latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column -- "Living like Anne Frank?"

I used the Anne Frank Apartment advertisement (on which I posted earlier this week) as the peg for my latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column. All my R-C columns can be read aggregated at my Ruthless Cosmopolitan site.

Living Like Anne Frank?

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Nov. 19, 2008

ROME (JTA)—An online accommodation agency I came across recently used one of the most tasteless slogans I’ve ever seen to advertise a holiday rental in Amsterdam.

"Amsterdam Stay Apartments present the Anne Frank apartment," read a banner across the top of the apartment’s Web page. "Live like Anne Frank during your Amsterdam stay," it promised, "with the keys to your own roof attic apartment.

"Live like Anne Frank?"

What on earth could these people have been thinking?



Read Full Story

Budapest -- Bob Cohen on Kadar eatery and other favorite Jewish quarter haunts

My friend, the Budapest-based musician Bob Cohen, writes a great blog that is largely based around eating..... His latest post describes the Kadar etkezde, a little lunchroom about a 7 minute walk from my apartment in Budapest, which I first sampled back in about 1990 and which remained a favorite of mine for years and which I've written about in the past. Located on Klauzal square in the heart of the old Jewish quarter (and what was the heart of the WW2 Ghetto), Kadar's is the closest thing in Budapest to a New York deli -- in spirit, if not in the choice of food. I haven't been there for awhile, though, as the last time I was there for lunch the food wasn't up to snuff. Bob's description though indicates that everything is back to normal. (For an earlier post by Bob about Kadar, click HERE.)

Anne Frank Apartment -- Action Being Taken

I contacted a friend at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and alerted him about the agency that has named one of its rentals the "Anne Frank Apartment" and advertises it with the slogan "Live like Anne Frank...." (I posted on this yesterday.)

My friend has informed me that the Anne Frank Foundation will be taking some sort of action. The name "Anne Frank" is in fact registered legally to the Foundation, precisely to prevent it from being used for commercial or touristic exploitation.

"The Foundation is the legal owner of the name Anne Frank," he said. "No-one can use it without our permission." Otherwise, he added, "we would have the whole neighborhood filled with Anne Frank cafes and the like..."

(The Foundation does give permission for the use of the name for Anne Frank schools and similar institutions -- and in the past it has been locked in controversy over other use of Anne's name or writings -- earlier this year, for example, over a Spanish musical based on Anne's diary. The Foundation supported the musical, but the Swiss-based Anne Frank Fonds, established by Anne's father in 1963 and the copyright holder of the diary itself, opposed it. )