Italy -- Economic Downturn May Threaten Care of Jewish Heritage

Moked.it, the daily online newsletter of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities runs an article today by Lucilla Efrati about how the current economic crisis and state budget cuts "risk reducing the attention paid to a precious and irreplaceable cultural patrimony" -- that is, the wealth of Jewish heritage in Italy that stretches back to ancient Roman times.

In 2009, she writes, the planned state funding for conservation and restoration work on Jewish cultural, architectural and archival heritage is expected to be cut by about 25 percent.

Even limited cuts in the funds budgeted for the care of these sites, she writes, risks rolling back the force of recent legal decisions that have enabled a number of important projects to proceed.

These centuries-old synagogues, cemeteries, and other sites, Efrati writes, "form part of the country's artistic patrimony [and] need care, maintenance and restoration work." Even limited cuts in the funds budgeted for the care of these sites, she writes, risks rolling back the force of recent legal decisions that have enabled a number of important projects to proceed.

Read the Full Story (in Italian)


(The picture that accompanies the Moked article is one that I took at the ceremony in September 2005 redidcating the old Jewish cemetery in Ancona after it was cleared up and restored. Below is another photo I took that day.)

Ancona Jewish cemetery, Sept. 2005. Photo (c) R. E. Gruber

Italy -- Hadassah Magazine Article on Jewish Traces in Southern Italy

Hadassah Magazine this month features an article about the rediscovery (or discovery) of Jewish heritage in southern Italy, "A Spark in the Bottom of the Boot," by Andree Elion Brooks.

Poland -- Useful Web Site

The "Diapositive" web site in Poland has undergone a make-over since the last time I looked at it. It has a useful English language section with a lot of information and links on contemporary Jewish life in Poland, as well as on Jewish heritage sites, resources and events.

Run by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, the site used to carry the full text of Adam Dylewski's Jewish guidebook to Poland,"When the Tailor Was a Poet" -- but now it presents the material (and more) in its "Traces of the Past" section.

Its starting map looks similar to the map that starts the POLIN portal of the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Hertiage in Poland, but I'm not sure if there's any direct link or cooperation.

Moldova -- More Other Europeans On The Road

Bob Cohen is back in Budapest and posting his impressions on his recent trip to Moldova with the Other Europeans Yiddish and Roma music project. It's great and informative reading! Pictures and videos, too!

Warsaw -- Cemetery Art Conference

It's too late to go, but today I received email notice of a big conference on cemetery art that's being held in Warsaw today and tomorrow (Dec. 4-5).

It looks as if it is all Polish scholars (and all in Polish), and the topics range over the whole field of graveyard/gravestone studies, both civic and religious, including monumental cemeteries and war cemeteries. One session is devoted to Jewish cemeteries in particular.

You can see the program by clicking HERE.

Moldova -- Holocaust Memorials

While we're waiting for Bob Cohen to post further news of the "Other Europeans" trip to Moldova, Der Spiegel runs a piece on how (slowly, finally) the Shoah is being commemorated in Moldova.

Reviving Memory in a Killing Field

By Michael Scott Moore in Berlin

Holocaust education is normal in Germany. But in some parts of Europe, where much of the killing took place, the past is buried under layers of politics and history. A Moldovan group is installing monuments to the ill-remembered slaughter of Romanian Jews.

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Czech Republic -- Terezin Tourism Woes

Agence France Presse has run an article about current economic and other woes in Terezin, the town north of Prague that was turned into a ghetto/concentration camp during World War II and serves as a memorial site for the Shoah.

Czech Town with Sad Past Fights Ghost Town Image
Dec. 1, 2008

TEREZIN (AFP)---The old Czech fortress town of Terezin, burdened by its past as a Jewish ghetto and transit camp under the Nazis then an army garrison under the communists, is trying hard not to become a ghost town.

"It would be good to have a magic wand, but we don't have one. Instead, we have a very long way to go," town hall secretary Miroslav Kubicek told AFP.

The town took a blow when the Czech army vacated the garrison in 1997, a move that slashed the population from 7,000 to today's tiny 2,000.

Most of those who have stayed are jobless, with little money to spend.

And efforts by the city council to breathe new life into the locality have so far ended in failure.

Read Full Story

Morocco -- Casablanca Jewish Museum

An article in the United Arab Emirates English language newspaper , The National, highlights the privately run Jewish Museum in Casablanca, Morocco, founded in 1997 and the first and to date only Jewish museum in the Arab world.

Jewish Museum Showcases Unity

John Thorne, Foreign Correspondent

Dec. 2, 2008

Simon Levy, left, the director of the Jewish museum in Morocco, speaks to visitors. Eve Coulon for The National

CASABLANCA // Ten years ago, Jewish fathers in Morocco looked at demographics and decided it was time to build a museum.

Morocco’s once-thriving Jewish community has shrunk to a handful since the creation of Israel in 1948. Today, Simon Levy, a linguist and historian, fights doggedly to preserve its memory as director of the Arab world’s only Jewish museum.

Mr Levy recently played host to a group of high school students. For most, it was their first exposure to Jewish Morocco. While Mr Levy normally sees a trickle of foreign Jewish tourists, his target audience are Muslim youngsters.

“More than anything, I want them to learn that there’s a different way of being Moroccan,” Mr Levy said.

READ FULL STORY

The Casablanca Jewish Museum was the subject of a longer article in The Forward last year.

Interestingly, it was also the subject of one of the papers presented at the conference on Representations of Jews in European Popular Culture, which I attended last week at the European University Institute in Fiesole, near Florence.

Jewish Museums in general formed the theme of one of the conference sessions.

In her presentation, "The Jewish Museum in Casablanca: Formation and Reflection of Contemporary Jewish Identity," Sophie Wagenhofer of the Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin, who also has worked at the Casablanca Museum, gave a description of its history and focus and also dealt with the way in which the museum presents the view of Moroccan Jews as Moroccans, part and parcel of national history, culture and society -- as she put it, "inscribing a minority's identity in the national identity".

She wrote:

[A] vital message of the exhibit is to strengthen the sameness of Muslims and Jews, which was done by referring to culture rather than religion. Muslims and Jews alike share the fields of culture, politics and economy as Moroccans in general, whereas from the point of religion the groups differ. Thus jewelry and everyday life items play a considerable role.

Here is how the article in The National puts it:

[The museum's founder and director, Simon Levy, asks visiting highschool] students to identify the Jews and Muslims in an old photograph. They guess unsuccessfully for a moment, then Mr Levy asks what the picture represents.

“Mixing?” a girl said.“No!” Levy said. “Because they are the same.”

Jews and Muslims share many customs that mark them as Moroccans, Mr Levy tells the students. They speak Moroccan Arabic, eat couscous and tajines, drink green tea laced with mint and make pilgrimages to the shrines of local Jewish and Muslim saints.

For a web site devoted to Jewish history, tourism and travel in Morocco, click HERE.

Synagogues -- Painted Curtains, etc

Sam Gruber has posted a detailed description and commentary on the Kupa synagogue in Krakow, based on a visit he made there recently. It's an excellent guide to the synagogue and discussion of issues raised in the restoration/renewal of the building carried out several years ago. He discusses in some detail the decorative painting on the walls and ceiling of the sanctuary.

The synagogue was in very dilapidated condition when I saw it first in 1990. I was told it had been used as a matzo factory after WW2. In Virtually Jewish, I quoted Monika Krajewska, who first visited the Kupa synagogue in the 1970s, when it was used as a warehouse:

"We stared at the walls, with their paintings: the lions, the deer, all the things that relate to Jewish biblical tradition of synagogue decoration. And there were workers who were just installing additional shelves; they were making holes in the lion's nose, in the instruments of the Levites painted on the ceiling."

Among the decorative elements discussed by Sam is that of curtains painted around the Ark -- in the picture below, Alan Bern, on piano, accompanies Lorin Sklamberg singing in front of the Ark of the Kupa at the Jewish Culture Festival in 2004.

Photo (c) R. E. Gruber


Sam writes:

A second decorative element that interests me a lot is the painting around the Ark, which is a large and impressive Baroque construction. On the wall behind the projecting stone Ark is painted a large red curtain, drawn apart just above the apex of the Ark. Of course this too, can have Temple associations, since a curtain in the Temple hung before the entrance of the Holy of Holies. Here, though, the curtain is hung behind the Ark, and it is open. What does it mean? Is it an earthly curtain, intended to create the illusion of greater synagogue space? Is it a symbolic curtain, representing either Temple or perhaps the revelation of the Torah? Or perhaps is it a curtain allowing a glimpse form this world into another? It could be all these things, or none. I’m not going to decide. But since I’m looking I am seeing these curtains almost everywhere - and they are one of the favorite European (or Polish) synagogue decorative devices carried over by immigrant artists from the old world to the new. I'm still looking for some contemporary user - a rabbi or congregant - who commented on their position and use.

I, too, have seen painted curtains around Arks in synagogues in several countries. Here is a short slide show of some of them: you can see the variety of construction of the Ark itself, as well as the way in which the curtain motif is used.

New York Times -- Houses of Worship Meet Bureaucracy

The New York Times has run an article about the recent destruction of a historic church in Brooklyn despite the objections of preservationists and local activists. The conditions are different in a host of ways, but the article has resonance for those of us interested in the fate of Jewish historical sites in Europe, and particularly in post-communist Europe.

Daunted by the cost of repairing and maintaining the 1899 building, the congregation had sold it to a developer for $9.75 million. He plans to build a 70-unit apartment building, and the congregation will erect a smaller church on the site.

The destruction went forward even though preservationists and the area’s City Council representative had repeatedly implored the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission to schedule a hearing on potential landmark status for the church, which was on the National and State Register of Historic Places.

Feelings on the issue ran so high that at a City Council hearing last year on the reappointment of Robert B. Tierney as chairman of the landmarks commission, the city councilman, Vincent J. Gentile, publicly berated the agency for declining to act. “It was a part of our history in this community being torn away from us,” Mr. Gentile said in an interview. “The sad part is, it didn’t have to be.”

Houses of worship are among the most sensitive issues facing the landmarks commission. Mandating that a church be preserved can not only impose a heavy financial burden on a congregation, it also raises the specter of state interference with religious freedom. So the commission has been especially loath to take on churches or synagogues that don’t want to be designated.

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