New York/Poland -- Mayer Kirshenblatt Exhibition

Mayer Kirshenblatt and his daughter, Barbara Kirshenblatt Gimblett, Krakow 2008. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

An exhibition of Mayer Kirshenblatt's paintings is on at the Jewish Museum in New York -- and it received a wonderful review in the New York Times.

Sometimes it takes a family, and a persistent one at that. So it was with Mayer Kirshenblatt, a reluctant painter and accidental memoirist whose words and images form an extraordinary exhibition at the Jewish Museum.

The exhibit, “They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust” includes nearly 70 canvases and a dozen works on paper -- most depict pre-war scenes of Jewish life in Kirshenblatt's hometown, Opatow (of Apt, in Yiddish) Poland.

I interviewed Kirshenblatt and wrote a lengthy article about him and his work last summer, when he and his daughter -- the scholar Barbara Kirshenblatt Gimblett, who currently heads the project of the upcoming Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw -- took part in the Festival of Jewish Culture in Krakow, carrying on a dialogue in front of an audience to mark the publication of a beautiful book of Mayer's paintings and also an exhibition in Opatow itself.

KRAKOW, Poland (JTA) – When Mayer Kirshenblatt was born, the town of Opatow in south-central Poland was known to most of its inhabitants as “Apt.” That’s because most of the population was Jewish, and Apt was Opatow’s name in Yiddish.

The Holocaust left Yiddish Apt a distant memory, glimpsed dimly in sepia-tinted photographs or locked up in the hearts of the few people still alive who had known it before the destruction.

Kirshenblatt was one of them until 1990 when, at the age of 73, he taught himself to paint and began to record in colorful detail the vibrant lost world of his childhood hometown.

“I only paint one thing – that’s Apt,” he said. “I paint not from my imagination but what actually happened.”

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The recollections were published last year along with nearly 200 of Kirshenblatt’s paintings as a book, “They Called Me Mayer July.” The title stems from Kirshenblatt’s childhood nickname, “Mayer Tamez,” or “Mayer July” – slang at the time for “Crazy Mayer.”

The book has won several awards and brought international attention to the work of Kirshenblatt, who left Poland for Canada in 1934.

In recent months Kirshenblatt’s paintings have been exhibited in San Francisco, and in the coming two years they are slated to be shown in Atlanta, New York, Amsterdam and Warsaw. This summer, for the second year in a row, Kirshenblatt’s work was featured at the annual Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow.

And on June 28, Kirshenblatt and his daughter brought his memories of Apt back to present-day Opatow with an exhibition of 50 full-scale digital prints of his paintings, on display at the Opatow District Office building.

“It was absolutely fabulous,” Kirshenblatt later said. “We had over 200 people and they made a tremendous display. The event was well advertised all over the city with posters – even the priest mentioned it.”

He added, “I’ve had exhibitions elsewhere, but here the people, the atmosphere, was absolutely the best I ever had.”

It was, Kirshenblatt said, a far cry from the first time that he returned to his hometown. That was in 1988, when Poland was still in the grip of communist rule. “I was crying,” he recalled. “I came to the town and there was not a sign of Jewishness.”

Since then, Kirshenblatt and his daughter have returned on other occasions and established good relations with Opatow’s residents.

“I enjoy going back there, and Opatow is beautiful,” he said. “But it’s not Apt.”

Displaying the energy of someone far younger than 91, Kirshenblatt and his daughter have toured extensively, accompanying slide shows of his paintings with lively discussions of the incidents and people portrayed.

“At my age,” he said, “to have another career like this is most terrific.”

Detailed, wry and often witty, Kirshenblatt’s paintings are peopled by sometimes crudely drawn characters, each of which seems to come to life as an individual. They crowd around dinner tables or cluster in the synagogue. They peer into windows, carry water in wooden buckets, play music, walk to school, mourn the dead, even commit a crime.

To a certain extent, the paintings recall the work of the American Grandma Moses, another self-taught artist who took up the brush in her 70s and created remembered scenes of rural life in 19th-century America.

History, though, has given Kirshenblatt’s work a special edge.

The titles of his paintings alone reflect complex, even convoluted tales that defy common stereotypes. Some examples: “The Kleptomaniac Slipping a Fish Down Her Bosom,” “Boy with a Herring,” “The Hunchback’s Wedding,” and “Jadzka the Prostitute Shows off her Wares at the end of Market Day at Harshl Kishke’s Well.”

“What I’m trying to say is, ‘Hey! There was a big world out there before the Holocaust,’ “ Kirshenblatt told his daughter in one recent conversation. “There was a rich cultural life in Poland as I knew it at the time. That’s why I feel I’m doing something very important by showing what that life was like.”

“It’s in my head,” he said. “I will be gone, but the book will be here.”

Read full article

Prague -- More on Rabbi Löw Exhibit

Golem figurines on sale in Prague. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

JTA runs an article by Dinah Spritzer with more information about the events that are being planned in Prague to mark the 400th anniversary of the death of Rabbi Judah Ben Bezalel Löw, a renowned scholar known as the Maharal and also the legendary creator of the Golem.

To celebrate Loew’s yahrzeit, which falls on Sept. 7, the Prague Jewish community is hosting a conference of scholars on the Maharal, and the Jewish Museum will be putting on an exhibit at the Prague Castle on Loew’s life. The exhibition runs from Aug. 5 to Nov. 8.

The show, at Prague’s most popular tourist site, will examine Loew and his legacy. One part of the exhibit will trace the development of the Prague ghetto and the Jewish cemetery during the rabbi's lifetime. An interactive installation, “Golem,” by the artist Petr Nikl, will be on view at the Jewish Museum’s Robert Guttmann Gallery from June 3 to Oct. 4.

Earlier this year, an institution dedicated to training rabbinical students in Loew’s teachings, the Maharal Institute, was opened by the Chabad-Lubavitch movement in Prague's Jewish Quarter.

Read full article

Dinah's article notes how closely Rabbi Löw was bound up in the legends and folklore of Prague, and particularly how the Golem myth somehow became associated with him -- more than two centuries after his death. There is no evidence at all that, however, that Rabbi Löw was involved in any magical activity. On the contrary, he condemned sorcery in the strongest of terms and even wrote that anyone who use magic for worldly reasons deserved to die.

Many other legends grew up around him, too. Indeed, so intimately linked did the Rabbi become with Prague that a statue of him was erected as part of the decoration of the art nouveau New Town Hall, built in 1910. The sculpture shows the ancient, long-bearded rabbi (he lived to about 90 -- no mean feat back in his day!) recoiling in horror as a muscular, nude young woman -- representing death -- clings to his robes and tries to gain hold of his arm.

His tomb is the most famous grave site in the Old Jewish Cemetery -- Michelle Obama made a stop there on her tour of Jewish Prague in March, and she even joined thousands who came before her and left a kvittl, or slip of paper with a prayer.

The Golem, too, became a familiar local folk figure. But the Golem story also inspired artists, writers, painters, and poets. My dear friend, the late Hungarian ceramic sculptor Levente Thury only created art works whose theme was the Golem. Among other writers inspired by the Golem story (which possible was the inspiration for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein) The poet Jerome Rothenberg, who frequently uses Jewish imagery and themes, wrote a powerful poem called "Golem & Goddess."

I wrote in depth about Rabbi Löw, his reality and his legend, in my 1994 book Upon the Doorposts of Thy House: Jewish Life in East-Central Europe, Yesterday and Today, whose first section was devoted to an exploration of Jewish Prague.

PS -- Twenty years ago, the Jewish Museum in New York had a wonderful exhibition called Golem! Danger, Deliverance and Art -- which produced a marvellous catalogue book. It's out of print, but well worth getting used.

Romania -- Jewish cemetery in Botosani Vandalized

I've just caught up with the news that the Jewish cemetery in Botosani, Romania was vandalized last month, and 24 tombstones were destroyed. The Bucharest Herald ran a graphic picture:

Photo: Bucharest Herald

From the picture, it seems as if the graves that were desecrated were in the most recent part of the cemetery.

According to the Romanian media, local police said that their initial investigation indicated that the desecration had been carried out by a group of seven youths.

“There are no signs that show it was a proof of anti-Semitism as there were no other signs or inscriptions. I think there were a few young persons under the influence of alcohol. It is a pity that the value and beauty of these old monuments were destroyed,” the local Jewish community president David Iosif told the media immediately after the attack.

The Romanian Center for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism, meanwhile, issued a communique criticizing Romanian authorities for excluding any anti-Semite motivation when such incidents take place.

"As much as we would like to believe the official position, we can not ignore – taking into account all previous incidents - the fact that the Jewish centers are preferred targets of the 'vandals'."

I visited the Botosani cemetery in 2006. There are several sections -- the more modern section is still in use by the tiny Jewish community. The older part of this features gravestones with metal canopies.

Behind the modern section is an older, rather overgrown, section where tombstones feature extraordinarily vivid carvings of lions and other animals, many of them clearly by the same artist/stone mason.

Botosani Jewish cemetery. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Next to this cemetery there is an even older cemetery, also with elaborately carved stones, but when I visited it was almost impossible to enter because of the vegetation.

Botosani has one of Romania's most important synagogues -- very plain on the outside but with gorgeous interior wall and ceiling paintings dating from the early 19th century and an extremely elaborate carved and painted Ark that arches into the sanctuary.

Prague -- Heads Up for Summer Exhibition on Rabbi Löw

Sign for Golem Restaurant in Prague. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

This Sept. 7 marks the 400th anniversary of the death of the famous Rabbi Judah Löw ben Bezalel --a renowned scholar known as the Maharal and also the legendary creator of the Golem, the artificial man brought to life to defend Prague's Jews who then ran amok, was deactivated and then hidden in the attic of the Old-New Synagogue.

Prague is gearing up to mark the date with events including a major exhibition jointly sponsored by the Jewish Museum in Prague and Prague Castle.

This exhibition aims to trace the Maharal’s life and work and to examine the image of this scholar in the eyes of his contemporaries and succeeding generations. Few people have attracted such a broad range of admirers, including those with starkly contrasting religious, philosophical and cultural views. There is a cavernous divide between the historical Maharal and the predominant image of him today. This fact is of such importance that it serves as the basis for the exhibition concept.

The exhibition, called "Path of Life," runs August 5-November 8 at the Royal Stables . The exhibit is divided into two main parts, one focusing on the historical Maharal and the authentic traditions connected with him, while the second will look at Rabbi Löw's legacy and the origin of the legends that are linked to his name.

The idea of the Maharal as the personification of the mystery of the ghetto, a miracle worker, mathematician and creator of an artificial being may not be historically grounded but it has provided immense inspiration for literature, drama and art. The historical and the imaginary Maharal both have a right to exist.

A major catalogue of the exhibition will be published in Czech and English, and other events and exhibits are also planned.

Already on June 3, an interactive installation called Golem, by the artist Petr Nikl will open at the Jewish Museum’s Robert Guttmann Gallery (it will run until Oct. 4).

Lithuania -- video of partly destroyed Pakruojis wooden synagogue

I want to attention readers to the comments below from Lithuania in response to this post -- the picture I had posted earlier was just a random shot, not the synagogue burning. Also, locals say this was the third attempt to torch the synagogue in recent months. Latest reports say about 1/3 not 1/2 of the building was destroyed.

My friend Ilya Lempertas in Vilnius, a Jewish historian and guide, has sent me a link to video on a Lithuanian news site that shows the fire damage Sunday to the historic wooden synagogue in the village of Pakruojis. The link to the video is THIS. But I've tried to embed it below (not totally successfully for some reasons). You may have to watch a brief commercial first, and at least on my computer the video is jerky, but it shows close-ups of the damage. Ilya says that according to reports from the scene, some 88 square meters of the roof as well as parts of the ceiling and walls were destroyed. A real tragedy.

This is the second historic synagogue in Lithuania to suffer destruction or serious damage in the past one and a half years. The so-called "Red Synagogue" in Joniskis collapsed in late December 2007. It had been undergoing fitful restoration (along with its "sister synagogue", the so-called "White Synagogue" standing next door to it), but one wall collapsed without warning.

Lithuania -- Pakruojis wooden synagogue burned down?

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

More depressing news. Lithuanian news sources say a possible arson fire has partially destroyed the historic wooden synagogue in the village of Pakruojis!

I have asked for details and will post what I find out.

Meanwhile, Sam Gruber has been in touch with colleagues in Lithuanian who report that:

Anti-Semitism in the country is reaching a "fever pitch" with many repeated articles claiming that Jews (especially George Soros) are wrecking the Lithuanian economy. There is also the "widespread belief that Jews and America prevent the prosecuting of 'Jewish Partisan war criminals.'"

I posted in October about the deteriorating condition of the synagogue, which was built in 1801 and is the oldest surviving wooden synagogue in Lithuania. Click HERE. Whatever the reasons, the destruction of this building would represent a tragic loss of a rare and remarkable Jewish heritage site.

Belaus -- Pictures of Luban Synagogue Being Demolished

Sam Gruber has posted a series of pictures, forwarded by Dovid Katz in Vilnius, showing the actual demolition of the synagogue in Luban, Belarus (which I wrote about in earlier posts). Here is one of them:



Writes Sam:

Can this be a wake-up call for better policies in Belarus and elsewhere? This was not a derelict building. It was not a ruined. It was not a forgotten site. It was sacrificed to the demands of contemporary development pressures where expediency and short term gain (to the public tax rolls or to a local politician's campaign war chest or private account) mean more than protecting history and architecture. No community in the world is immune to these pressures. Nor should every old building be saved. But there needs to be in place - in every community - procedures that allow time for review and reflection, and time for world to get out that a building is imperiled.

Berlin - Jewish Museum

The New York Times runs a devastating critique of the Jewish Museum in Berlin. It contrasts the Museum with the more recent exhibition at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

Published: May 1, 2009

BERLIN — There may be worse Jewish museums in the world than the Jüdisches Museum Berlin, which opened in 2001. But it is difficult to imagine that any could be as uninspiring and banal, particularly given its pedigree and promise. Has any other Jewish museum been more celebrated or its new building (designed by Daniel Libeskind) so widely hailed? Is any other Jewish museum of more symbolic importance? [. . .]

The resulting strain is almost bipolar, with the building aggressively screaming about apocalypse as its exhibition affirms harmonious universalism, with neither making its case.

The building, for example, proposes that the shattered, fractured world of the Holocaust is best suggested by shattered, fractured space. You enter the exhibition by descending a lobby staircase that leads into a world of skewed geometry. The floors are raked and tilted. Displays are off-kilter. And rather than feeling something profound, you almost expect moving platforms and leaping ghosts, as in an amusement park’s house of horrors.

Add to this a sheen of pretense. One corridor is called the Axis of Exile, because along it are the personal effects of Jews who fled Germany during the 1930s. Another is named the Axis of the Holocaust, which shows letters and photographs of murdered Jews. And lest it all look too bleak, an Axis of Continuity leads upstairs, where you learn about where all of this fits into 2,000 years of German Jewish history.

Meanwhile, the items on display are so cursorily identified and their owners so obliquely described that they might as well have been anonymous points on an Axis of Victimhood. The space trivializes history rather than revealing it.

Read full article

Rothstein criticizes the architecture, with its axis of exile, etc, but he does not really go into the development of the concept behind them. OK, it may seem (and be) pretentious, at least in hindsight, but during the development phase, in the 1990s, it made bold new statements that touched chords and made them resolate loudly. I remember visiting the partly complete building in something like 1997 and feeling the power of the structure -- indeed, it became a major attraction in itself, both before completion and after completion, before the exhibition was installed. Books were written on it. My friend, the Berlin artist Joachim Seinfeld guided hundreds of tours to the empty building.

The exhibition concept and layout has been problematic since the beginning; at first it was so overcrowded with objects it seemed hard to breathe. These were weeded out, but the difficulty of mounting the installations in the weird space remained a constant. Already in 2003 I was on a panel at the annual meeting of the Association of European Jewish Museums that among other things offers critiques.

I thought I'd take a look at what the Times said in earlier articles about the museum.

Michael Kimmelman, in 2004, was just as critical as Rothstein of the museum, but he put a lot of its problems into more context, focusing in part on how Daniel Libeskind's widely-acclaimed design created difficulties of its own.

The building was opened with nothing in it in 1999. Nearly 350,000 people came to see it before any exhibition was installed. Many writers speculated about whether it might best be left empty, as a Holocaust memorial sculpture, not least because it looked nearly impossible to fill coherently with objects. It has been. Sloping grades, crooked passageways, dead ends, tall voids and other willful spaces were explained by Mr. Libeskind and then by others as architectural metaphors for the fate of Germany's Jews, for their difficult journey through history. [. . . ]

Stories of individual Jews, many of them of women, humanize the exhibition. They are told about different sorts of people, not only about artists and writers; the museum thereby sidesteps the stereotype of Jews as people of culture, which, while flattering, may imply that the life or death of a Jewish banker or street peddler is less worth honoring.

But over all the architecture and the exhibition trivialize and overwhelm history. The museum panders to the sort of audience of middlebrow Germans and tourists who don't know any real, live Jews, watering down and sweetening up the past. Even pared back from the 3,900 objects it had at the opening, the exhibition is a smorgasbord of tidbits. Visitors graze. Here are the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn's glasses next to recipes for kosher food; there is a display about medicine next to one about Jews being burned.

Mr. Libeskind's building posed obvious practical hurdles, but the installation is its own inchoate maze of added nooks and crannies, platforms, stairs and partitions, stuffed with gadgets and gimmicks. You can put on a backpack as heavy as a peddler wore. You can peel open a giant sculpture of a garlic. You can mint a coin. You can participate in computerized straw polls.

At article about its opening, in September 2001, puts the conceptual aspect in the foreground.

But while the museum is devoted to a fine, carefully planned exhibit of the full range of Jewish life here, from the arts to the ordinary, it lives in an extraordinary building, designed by Daniel Libeskind, that is itself a sculpture on the theme of the Holocaust. It is a deconstructed, riven Star of David, full of slashing windows and sharp angles, twisting corridors and tilting floors, rough cement and tall, cold empty voids, that bring to a visitor the dizziness and horror of absence, loss, dislocation and loneliness. [. . . ]

A visitor enters this building from an airy, light hall, but is directed down, along a twisted black metal staircase lined by grills at odd angles.

There are three ''underground roads,'' in Mr. Libeskind's conception. The first and longest leads to the main stairs, which rise to the exhibition floors about Jewish life here since Roman times. The second leads outdoors, to a ''Garden of Exile,'' representing the forced emigration of Germany's Jews, with angled pillars topped by willow oaks and cobbled walkways tilted to produce a kind of nausea.

The third leads, Mr. Libeskind wrote, ''to a dead end -- the Holocaust Void,'' called the Holocaust Tower. Here, a large, forbidding, empty space rises up the full height of the building and ends at an acute angle.

Another void, devoted to memory, has a compelling sculpture by an Israeli, Menashe Kadishman, called ''Fallen Leaves.'' Much of the floor is filled with thousands of rusted steel faces, some large and some tiny, most of them open-mouthed and screaming.

Italy/New York -- Sam Gruber to speak on Venice Jewish history

For those of you in New York, Sam Gruber, the president of the International Survey of Jewish Monuments (ISJM), will be speaking in New York May 7 on the "prehistory" of the Venice Ghetto.

The lecture will be at the Colony Club in New York on Thursday, May 7th, at 6:30 pm, followed by cocktails. Tickets are $40 and must be purchased in advance from Save Venice. Mail checks to 15 East 74th Street, New York, NY 10021.

Its not a talk about the Ghetto per se, but of the social, political and topographical background of Venice in the late 15th and early 16th century that encouraged the Ghetto's creation.

For full information click HERE

Belarus -- More on Luban Synagogue Destruction

On his Jewish arts and monuments blog, Sam Gruber has posted more detailed information about the demolition of the historic former synagogue in Luban, Belarus -- as well as pictures of what he rightly describes as an "impressive vernacular building." The wooden synagogue, built in the 19th century, is being demolished to make way for some sort of commercial development.

Former Luban synagogue, c. 2005 -- photo courtesy of the Jewish Heritage Research Group in Belarus

Sam writes that according to Yuri Dorn of the Jewish Heritage Research Group in Belarus:

the Luban authorities did not inform Belarus Jewish community about planned demolition. He did not speculate why, but presumably they were either ignorant of the need to do so, or of any likely interest in the fate of the building, or they suspected that if word got out that their would be complaint. Based on my long experience in historic preservation I would assume the worst, and that is the reason for the rush to demolish, so that any protest will be too late. In 2004, the Jewish Community of Belarus tried unsuccessfully to include the Luban Synagogue building on the official registry of landmarks, but was unable to do so because of insufficient archival documentation about the building's history. Presumably it was deemed eligible on architectural grounds alone.

Sam also includes a picture of the English/Russian/Hebrew commemorative plaque on the building.