Poland -- Video about non-Jewish Poles Rescuing Jewish Cemeteries

A video that profiles several non-Jewish Poles who have devoted a good part of their lives to protecting and saving abandoned Jewish cemeteries in Poland has been posted on YouTube by Menachem Daum. Called "Common Ground," it's a trailer for a longer documentary on the subject that Menachem wants to produce -- and is trying to raise funds for.



Menachem directed the wonderful documentaries "Hiding and Seeking" and "A World Apart".

He was involved with the conference of Poles who preserve Jewish heritage, held last year -- see my blog post on it.

Warsaw -- Useful (Downloadable) Jewish Travel Brochure

Panel on Jewish shtetl life from an open-air exhibition in Warsaw, 2008. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

A very useful illustrated Jewish travel guide to Warsaw is available from the Warsaw tourism office. You can get the illustrated brochure at tourist offices there or download a PDF of it by clicking HERE. (The link takes you to the English/Polish edition -- there is also an edition in Spanish and Italian.)

The brochure, which features a picture of the Nozyk synagogue on its cover, was edited by Jan Jagielski of the Jewish Historical Institute -- one of most knowledgeable experts on Warsaw's Jewish history and heritage sites. Jan's an old friend. He was a pioneer in the documentation of Jewish heritage in Poland, and back 1990 he co-wrote a more detailed guide to Jewish Warsaw that I used extensively in my own work and travels.

The new brochure, published last summer, includes photographs and descriptions of 28 sites around the city and also includes links for Jewish organizations and information on Jewish cultural events.

Brightly colored, it is one of a series of new brochures on various aspects of Warsaw, all using the same general format.

Rome -- Link to Jewish Tour Guide

Inside the Jewish Museum, Rome. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

People often ask me to recommend Jewish sites for them to see in various cities or recommend a Jewish guide to take them around.

Here's a link to a web site to a Jewish travel guide and service for Rome -- JewishRoma.

It is run by Micaela Pavoncello, a native of the Eternal City, whose Jewish community dates back more than 2,000 years and is the oldest one in Europe. Micaela introduces herself this way:

I was born in Rome from a Jewish Roman father (proud to be here since Cesar’s time!) and a Libyan Jewish Sephardic mother. I have lived in Rome my entire life (not including the year I spent in Argentina and another year in Israel). Traveling has given me the opportunity to meet other Jews, share my story with them, and compare my community with theirs and other communities. Throughout my time as a guide, while meeting people along my journey, I have come to realize how miraculous the existence of the Jewish Community of Rome really is.

Rome's main Jewish sites include the historic ghetto area, with the imposing synagogue complex and Jewish museum, plus ancient Roman-era sites such as Jewish catacombs and the ruins of an ancient synagogue at Ostia Antica.

Main Synagogue, Rome. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

There is an active Jewish life in the city, with several synagogues, kosher restaurants and cafes, and various educational and cultural institutions. There are also frequent Jewish-themed exhibitions, concerts, theatrical performances and other events.

Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Moldova -- Bob Cohen's Ode to the Knish (and other food)

The old Settlement Cookbook had on its cover the phrase "the way to a man's heart is through his stomach" (or so I remember). But, I think the way to ancestral memory, heimishness, home-thoughts, whatever you may call them is also through the stomach. Or at least the taste-buds. Or at least in descriptions of tastes and textures of what we eat. That's why some things are called comfort foods. And why Jewishness to some resides in lox, bagels, kreplach, kasha and knishes, rather than in anything religious.

On his latest blog post, Bob Cohen delves (almost literally) into contemporary culinary heaven in today's Moldova - with pictures. Wending through the Ashkenazi heartland, to the heart, through the stomach (by way, perhaps, of clogged arteries). Hidden gardens of knish, he calls it.

Great reading, and I envy the eating!

PS Bob, as I've noted earlier, was in Moldova on The Other Europeans project... he includes some great video of Adam Stinga, Kalman Balogh and others jamming between meals.

I'm Quoted on CNN

Check out this article on the CNN web site, quoting me about Jewish-Catholic relations in the wake of the scandal over the Holocaust-denying bishop Richard Williamson....

Priceless Jewish Library (in Hebrew) up for Auction

Here's a link to the NYTimes story by Edward Rothstein about a priceless (and huge) Hebrew library up for auction....the ultimate Jewish heritage armchair travel...

Is bibliophilia a religious impulse? You can’t walk into Sotheby’s exhibition space in Manhattan right now and not sense the devotion or be swept up in its passions and particularities. The 2,400-square-foot opening gallery is lined with shelves — 10 high — reaching to the ceiling, not packed tight, but with occasional books open to view. Each shelf is labeled, not with a subject, but with a city or town of origin: Amsterdam, Paris, Leiden, Izmir, Bombay, Cochin, Cremona, Jerusalem, Ferrara, Calcutta, Mantua, Shanghai, Alexandria, Baghdad and on and on.

You can’t read these books or pluck them from the shelves. But you feel their presence as you explore, particularly in adjoining rooms where volumes are open inside cases for closer scrutiny.

These 13,000 books and manuscripts were primarily collected by one man, Jack V. Lunzer, who was born in Antwerp in 1924, lives in London and made his fortune as a merchant of industrial diamonds. The collection’s geographical scale is matched by its temporal breadth, which extends over a millennium. But this endeavor is not just an exercise in bibliophilia. These are all books written in Hebrew or using Hebrew script, many of them rare or even unique. Most come from the earliest centuries of Hebrew printing in their places of origins and thus map out a history of the flourishing of Jewish communities around the world.

Read Full Article

Shanghai -- Jewish Quarter Under Threat (and Shanghai Moon)

NPR reports that the historic Jewish quarter in Shanghai -- where thousands of Jews fleeing Europe during the Holocaust found refuge -- is under threat from developers.

In the 1930s, Shanghai was the only place in the world to offer visa-free sanctuary to Jews fleeing Nazism — 20,000 ended up in Shanghai. In 1943, the Japanese restricted them to a one-square-mile area, which became known as Little Vienna.

A pianist and a violinist used to play popular music for customers at the White Horse Inn, or Das Weisse Rossl. The waitresses wore dirndls — traditional Bavarian outfits — and the menu featured Wiener schnitzel.

But the White Horse wasn't in Austria or Germany, it was in wartime Shanghai. And for the city's wealthier Jewish refugees, it offered a memory of homes that no longer existed.

- - - -

The White Horse Inn is among a number of buildings inside the Jewish district to be knocked down to make way for a widened road.

As they start work, the demolition crews are uncovering layers of the past, like unwitting architectural archaeologists. By knocking down shop facades, old shop signs beneath are revealed, like one for Wuerstel Tenor, a sandwich shop, which had been covered for decades.

They will pull down other fading shop fronts at the heart of Little Vienna, as well — those of Cafe Atlantic and Horn's Imbiss-stube (Horn's Snack Bar).

Read (or Listen to) Full Story

Coincidentally, the award-winning mystery novelist SJ Rozan has just come out with a new book that is partly set in the Jewish refugee milieu of wartime Shanghai. It's called The Shanghai Moon and concerns a (fictional) legendary jewel from that era, believed lost and/or stolen....

Rozan is an old friend of mine, and this marks the first time she has used a Jewish theme in her mysteries -- most of which (like The Shanghai Moon) are a series featuring a Chinese-America detective, Lydia Chin, and her Anglo partner, Bill Smith.

You can read an excerpt from The Shanghai Moon by clicking HERE.

Moldavia -- Bob Cohen on East European Comfort Food

The Jewish Museum in Berlin is preparing an exhibition on Food and Religion, and I've been asked to write an essay on Jewish-style restaurants in East-Central Europe for the catalogue (mainly the kitschy ones, but I'll have to add a couple of the real thing, I think). Coincidentally, I just received an email announcement of conference on "Culinary Judaism" to be held in England this summer:

Call for Papers: BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR JEWISH STUDIES Conference
12-14 July 2009, Durham, UK:
`Culinary Judaism'

THEME AND VENUE

The 2009 annual conference will take place at St Aidan's College,
Windmill Hill, Durham, 12-14 July 2009. The theme of the conference
will be `Culinary Judaism'. Speakers are invited to present papers
concerning all issues related to food and the use of food in Jewish
texts and cultures, addressing such issues as commensality, cooking,
creation of boundaries, identity, symbolism, sacrifice and material
cultural objects related to or symbolic of eating, etc. The term
`culinary' is interpreted broadly and as suggested extends to
sacrifice and other symbolic uses of food or food related objects. It
is hoped that this broad interpretation of the theme will encourage
members of BAJS from a wide range of research fields to participate.

Bob Cohen takes a far far less academic approach in the blog entry from his Moldavia trip he has just posted, describing in lush (luscious) detail the market foods he found there, many if not most of which form the gustatory core of Ashkenazi eating. You know, pickles, prunes, smoked fish....

Fish was everywhere - interesting given that Moldova is landlocked, but Odessa is only an hour away and as former CCCP appetites know, if you want to drink you need some zakuska to eat with your vodka, and that means some smoked fish. In many ways, if you are used to New York jewish foods, you won't be dissappointed in fressing in Moldova. Jewish culinary traditions have been deeply absorbed into Moldovan cuisine - supermarkets are packed at the arrival of hot, fresh baked challah on friday afternoons.

Hard Times for Jewish Museums

The New York Jewish Week has a brief (and oddly lighthearted) article describing the negative impact the current financial crisis (including the Madoff scam) is having on the Jewish museum world.

by Eric Herschthal

There was plenty to talk about at this year’s Conference of American Jewish Museums. Days before the event began here Sunday, Brandeis’ trustees announced that they were selling off the jewels in its Rose Art Museum — works by Warhol, de Kooning and Hoffman — to cover the university’s deficits. No one at the conference had any clue how much the Madoff scandal would affect future fundraisers. And, of course, it was anyone’s guess how long or deep this recession might be.

Read Full Article

Kiev -- Sholom Aleichem house torn down

Sholom Aleichem monument, Kiev. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

JTA reports that one of the buildings in Kiev where the great Yiddish writer Sholom Aleichem lived has been torn down by a real estate developer to make way for a hotel.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of Shalom Aleichem's birth (in the small town of Pereslayev), and in December, JTA reported that Ukraine had kicked off national celebrations marking the occasion with an exhibition in Kiev on the author, who evoked the shtetl in his writings and created characters such as the iconic Tevye the Milkman. As part of the celebrations, a Sholom Aleichem museum is due to be opened in Kiev, dedicated to his life and work and to Yiddish culture, architecture and folklore in general. Sholom Aleichem lived in Kiev from 1897 to 1905. A monument to him -- a statue of the author tipping his hat -- stands in central Kiev near the Brody synagogue.

A building in Kiev where the famed Yiddish writer, born Solomon Rabinovich on Feb. 18, 1859, lived in 1905 was destroyed over the weekend by the private company KievZhytloInvestManagement, despite instructions by city authorities to the company to suspend the demolition in order to clarify the case.

The site is being prepared for a new hotel for the Euro-2012 soccer tournament, according to reports.

“This is a disgraceful act to destroy that building,” said Ilya Levitas, a president of the Jewish Council of Ukraine, who addressed a petition to the deputy prime minister of Ukraine and Kiev authorities on Jan. 21, requesting that the city order a stop or suspension of the demolition.

“Activities of KievZhytloInvestManagement Company, that is an owner of the building, shocked the public this past weekend," Irina Zalyuzhenkova, an inspector for the Association for the Protection of Monuments of History and Culture, told JTA. "In spite of city authority instructions and a visit to the site, the company destroyed the building. They could find no other site.

. . . .

Mikhail Kalnitzky, a historian of Kiev, said Sholom Aleichem lived at 35 Bolshaya Vasylkivska St., apartment 1 in Kiev.

"The local authorities’ fault is that they didn’t put the building on the register list of state or municipal monuments of architecture," he said. "That is why the private company is destroying the building.”

Evgeny Chervonenko, a first deputy of the Kiev mayor and a prominent Jewish leader, told JTA that the Kiev authority will establish a committee to clarify the case properly.

Read Full Article

I included information on the Sholom Aleichem trail in the Kiev section of National Geographic Jewish Heritage Travel. I noted the address of this apartment as Bolshaya Vasylkivska st 5, not 35 -- and I said there was a plaque marking it. The sources I consulted said he lived there from 1897-1903. Sholom Aleichem also lived in Kiev at Saksagansky 27, where I also recall there being a plaque. He was at this address from 1903-1905.

Click HERE for an interesting blog post by Larry Kaufman I came across recently describing his experiences on Jewish and non-Jewish organized travel in Kiev.