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| Presov synagogue. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber |
For me and my family, Shatsk has always seemed like an impossibly exotic travel destination. I found it hard to believe that, as the Ukrainian census informed me, about 6,000 people lived there. Or that it had a nightclub called Sinatra and several ATMs.
But somehow, you can drive to Shatsk -- and you don't even need a souped-up DeLorean. After just four hours on roads whose quality varied from poor to middling to dear-God-is-this-a-road, my mother, our guide and I had traded the comparatively cosmopolitan Lviv -- which was feverishly preparing for the 2012 European soccer championship -- for the dusty roads of Shatsk, which lay dormant in the absence of summer's rush of tourists. [...]
For 22 years, I had wondered what Shatsk meant for me. Was it a living, breathing place? Or just the graveyard of my family's past? Was it some hell my family had escaped from? Or the bucolic paradise they spent decades in America pining after?
I'm aware of the challenges that come with heritage tourism. I spent 36 hours in Shatsk. Who is to say I've learned anything substantive about a place to which I parachute in, hunt around for some information and snap a few photos? How can I be sure that my newfound connection to Ukraine and my long-lost relatives is something more than fetishizing the past and longing for an idealized Shatsk that may have never existed?
But if heritage tourism is an imperfect science, it's an important one. As a Jew in New York, it's easy to lose sight of history -- to view the past as a neat arc that started at Ellis Island, paused on a stoop in Brooklyn and triumphantly culminated in the green pastures of Westchester County or Long Island. If we consider the Old Country at all, it’s of a sanitized variety: Pop "Fiddler on the Roof" in the DVD player, rinse and repeat.
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| My first visit to Radauti, at the grave of my great-grandmother |
December 16, 1999
Ten Years After the Wall
Memories of lost family are conjured when walking in footsteps of the past
By Ruth E. Gruber
On a frosty November morning, I walked around the two massive, ruined synagogues that form a unique surviving Jewish complex in Kalvarija, a small, sleepy town in southern Lithuania near the border with Poland.
One of the synagogues was built in the early 18th century. Its roof had fallen in and its bottom windows were bricked up, but it was possible to see arches and other architectural detail and decoration.
The other, built in about 1803, was more or less intact, but crumbling. Between the two stood a red brick building, a former rabbi's house and a cheder, or Jewish school, with a big Star of David above the door.
As I have done in hundreds of other cities, towns and villages in more than a dozen countries, I took pictures of the synagogues from every angle.
With my eye focused through my camera, I didn't watch where I was walking. Suddenly, I tripped over a broken brick, half buried in the uneven yard, and went crashing to the ground.
Trying to save my cameras, I ended up twisting my ankle so that I could hardly walk.
The injury took weeks to heal fully, but everyone told me that my spill was beshert -- fated -- and maybe it was.
Kalvarija is the town from which my great-grandfather, Pesach Susnitsky, emigrated some 120 years ago, ending up in the small town of Brenham, Texas.
In Brenham, Pesach became Philip. He was the patriarch of a huge family of children, including my grandmother, who was born in Brenham, and a pious pillar of the Jewish community.
In Brenham, he helped found a Jewish congregation. The little wooden synagogue that was built in 1894 still stands.
When he left Kalvarija in about 1880, Jews made up more than 80 percent of the town's population. By 1939, it had dropped to about 25 percent, but still about 1,000 Jews lived in the town.
No Jews live there today, and I must say that given the depressing and bloody history of the town and region during World Wars I and II, and decades of later Soviet domination, I am enormously thankful that my great-grandfather had the courage to leave when he did.
Still, the buildings I was photographing were not just fascinating sites of Jewish heritage in general: they were the places where my ancestors worshiped and studied.
The streets of the town, with their small, mainly low wooden houses, and the central square dominated by a big, white church with two ornate towers, were the streets and square where my ancestors walked.
I had driven there with a friend after spending the night near the Polish town of Suwalki, about 20 miles to the south. Until a few years ago, such a day trip from Poland to Kalvarija would have been difficult if not impossible.
For one thing, American citizens today do not need a visa to enter Lithuania. While Kalvarija is the first town in Lithuania across the border from Poland, the border crossing-point was opened only four years ago.
I didn't have a real genealogical agenda for my visit -- I just wanted to see the town. But I had hoped to spend much of the day walking through the quiet streets, poking into corners and possibly talking to local people.
My injured ankle cramped my capabilities, though -- and here's where beshert comes in.
An old woman told us where the Jewish cemetery was located, on the other side of the little Sheshupa River that winds through the town, and my friend and I decided to drive straight there.
Pesach Susnitsky died in Texas in 1939 at the age of 83. Several years ago, I visited his grave in the Jewish cemetery in Brenham.
I had little hope of finding any Susnitsky graves in Kalvarija, but I was eager to visit the cemetery just to see it.
We found a small, fenced-in, triangular plot of ground right in front of a huge electric grid, which contained several dozen simple tombstones, some of them toppled.
Hobbling, I starting photographing the site. Just then an old man came by, wheeling a bicycle.
"I know everything, everything," he smiled. All his teeth were capped in gold. "I remember everything how it was."
He propped up his bike and began to talk. He described how the cemetery used to extend much, much further, stone after stone, all the way down to the river, but the Germans destroyed it, and most remaining stones were stolen.
Now on top of the area, there are ugly, poor barracks where people live -- with no indoor plumbing, they have to walk 50 yards or so to toilets. Pigs and dogs frolic around. A man passed by leading a cow.
Of the remaining graves, the only mausoleum, he said, was that of a certain Menashe who was a "millionaire."
I asked the old man if he remembered the Susnitsky family -- and he did.
"Of course! There were a lot of Susnitskys here, a lot." Particularly, he said, before the war, there were two Susnitsky brothers in town, Alter and Yankel, who must have been nephews or great-nephews of Pesach. "Alter was a big, tall man," he said. "Yankel was small, curved over and had a hunch back." He demonstrated, scooping out his own body.
The brothers lived together in a big house on a hill, he said -- and then he led us there to see it. Indeed, it was one of the most imposing wooden houses in the village. Undergoing some renovation, it even sported a satellite dish.
Both brothers were killed when the Germans deported the Jews to nearby Mariampole during World War II, he told us.
The old man said all the houses on this street were occupied by Jews, and that Jews lived all over the town. "So many, so many!" He gestured forlornly.
He was clearly nostalgic for past times -- and the disappearance of the Jewish community represented for him a change for the worse. Nonetheless, in describing the Jews in town, he used the Polish term Zydek or "little Jew" -- a term Jews regard as pejorative.
The Jews in Kalvarija were "good people," and "wealthy," the man said, they took care of each other and everyone got on with everyone.
"They were called Yankele, Alterke, Menashe, Meyshke," he recalled. "They would say, 'Oy vey, oy vey.'"
On her birthday in 1999, Ellen Levitt decided to look for her mother’s former synagogue in Flatbush. The building was still there, but the congregation was gone, replaced by a Pentecostal Christian one. The news dismayed her mother, but for Levitt, it sparked an idea: to find and document other former synagogues, and to create a record so others could find them as well.
In 2009, her project became a book called “The Lost Synagogues of Brooklyn,” and this past November, Levitt released her latest installment, “The Lost Synagogues of the Bronx and Queens.”
As the project grew, Levitt discovered that synagogues that had not been burned or torn down were adapted for other uses. Some became private homes, one is a correctional facility, another is used for city maintenance and one is even a mosque — but most are now churches. Read moreIn New York, these transformations usually came about because of normal demographic changes that saw Jews moving from one neighborhood to another (often from small towns to cities or from to urban centers and suburbs), while in post-World War II Europe synagogues were most often orphaned by the murder of their community in the Holocaust, suppression by post-war communist regimes, or emigration of survivors. In Bulgaria, for example, whose Jews survived the Shoah, synagogues were left abandoned when almost all Jews moved to Israel.
The former Corona Hebrew School on 53rd Avenue, for example, boasts large stars of David on either side of its gate. Names written in Hebrew are displayed on pillars and walls on the porch. After the Jewish congregation left, the building became a private residence and music studio, and was home to Madonna, pre-fame, in the late 1970s.
Another great example is the former Young Israel of Laurelton on 228th Street. It’s a boxy 1956 building that displays a cornerstone with the Hebrew and secular dates. But its most intriguing feature is the huge window above the main entrance in the shape of a Jewish star, an emblem that the Jamaica-Queens Wesleyan Church has kept as is.
The co-operation agreement concluded between the Jewish Historical Institute Association, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews and the Center for Jewish Culture and Information in Vilnius governs the co-operation with regard to the administration of the ‘Virtual Shtetl’ portal.
Under this international agreement, the Lithuanian version of the ‘Virtual Shtetl’ portal will be created. The Center for Jewish Culture and Information in Vilnius, together with the teams from the Museum of the History of Polish Jews and the Jewish Historial Institute Association, will research the history of Jewish communities that lived in the territory of contemporary Lithuania and will promote the knowledge about Jewish cultural monuments in Lithuania on the ‘Virtual Shtetl’ portal.
It is the beginning of a very promising co-operation and it will be the first time that a foreign organization contributes so extensively to the development and administration of the ‘Virtual Shtetl’ portal. The concluded agreement paves the way to international research and cultural projects on the history of Jews in Eastern and Central Europe.
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| Vandalized tomb in Nis Cemetery, Dec. 22, 2011. Photo courtesy of Jasna Ciric |
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| Pictures from Dec. 22, 2011 showing homes and other structures encroaching on the Nis Jewish cemetery. Photos courtesy Jasna Ciric |
In January 2010 the current restoration project began. This restoration was necessary because the annexes were in very poor condition and had never previously been restored from the foundations. The aim of the restoration and provision of access was to maintain the Synagogue's authenticity.To see specifics of the restoration, click on the following links:
Renovation of and rearrangement to ensure easy access to the Portuguese Synagogue is a wonderful and unique addition to the city's cultural features. It will reinforce the cultural and economic infrastructure and make the city and region more attractive for residents and visitors. This heritage is unique, in that it remains a lively building with an equally vibrant community that uses it to this day.
The Esnoga is a pearl for Amsterdam and the Netherlands. In use for centuries, it is now literally opening its doors to the general public. Visitors will be able to view the art treasures, which are maintained according to museum preservation standards, in their natural context. The functional areas will also be made visible and accessible to visitors, who will thus feel like guests in the community. Visiting this historic complex is like taking a stroll through the past and present of a community that has been celebrating its religion and culture for three centuries within these walls.
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| Photo from: www.portugesesynagoge.nl |
The commercial aspects of Hervás’s festival—funded by the village’s chamber of commerce as a boon to local business—are hardly unique. Birobidzhan’s cultural renaissance, has, similarly, garnered it development grants from Moscow; while on the fringes of the Kraków festival, stands sell hook-nosed “Jew” figurines. Yet much more is at stake in both places than profit. In Kraków, with its rich, traumatic history, the festival is an attempt to confront the still relatively fresh loss of what was once the world’s largest Jewish population, as well as the question of Polish complicity with Nazis in the war, communist suppression of Holocaust history, and continuing European intolerance; it’s also a chance for Poles to reflect on their country’s future as a conservative, culturally monolithic nation in a changing, diversifying Europe. Birobizhan’s Jewish cultural revival appears primarily to enliven an isolated, poor, rather bleak place unremarkable but for its unique history. Despite some silliness and confusion, the more sober efforts to teach Yiddish and Jewish history ensure that important legacies are preserved. And perhaps even theme-park-style memorialization is more salutary than the more common case in places from which vital cultures have more or less vanished: sheer oblivion.
In Hervas, the evocation of a Jewish past is so perfunctory and historically fanciful as to border on the offensive. Stars of David adorn street signs, window grates, and even, for no clear reason, the church. There is a Judería Tavern and a Hotel Sinagoga: the former, on inspection, specializing in ham, the latter indistinguishable from a Holiday Inn. On arrival, I was amused by the kitsch; but by my last day, I felt vaguely sick. The empty symbolism cruelly underscored all that Europe has lost.
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| Synagogue in Stupava. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber |
