Lack of Funding Closes Museum Housing Sarajevo Haggadah

Sarajevo Haggadah in bank vault, 2001. Photo © Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

This post also appears on my En Route blog for the LA Jewish Journal

The Bosnia-Herzegonia National Museum in Sarajevo, where the priceless Sarajevo Haggadah is kept, is being forced to close for lack of funds -- the latest in a number of major cultural institutions in Sarajevo forced to shut their doors due to political wrangling and the central government's halting of funds for culture.

In my brief JTA story I write that Jakob Finci, the longtime leader of the Jewish community in Sarajevo, said the museum, founded in 1888, would close on Thursday due to “lack of money, financing and support from the State.”

He called the decision “tragic,” but said he did not fear for the Sarajevo Haggadah, which, he said would be kept in a safe place.

The haggadah, handwritten in Spain in the 14th century and brought to Sarajevo after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, has been owned by the museum since 1894. 

During the Bosnian war in the 1990s, the lavishly illustrated, 109-page book became a symbol of the shattered dream of multi-ethnic harmony in Bosnia. After the war ended in 1995, the U.N. Mission, along with the Bosnian Jewish Community, the Joint Distribution Committee, and the Yad Hanadiv and Wolfenson Foundations, facilitated a $150,000 project to restore the Haggadah and prepare a secure, new, climate-controlled room in which to put it on display. 

This was opened with a gala ceremony in December 2002. But Finci told JTA that, in recent years, the actual Haggadah was only displayed on four days a year – all the rest of the time a facsimile was shown.

In 2001, before it went on public display, I had the rare opportunity of viewing the Haggadah in the underground bank vault in Sarajevo where it was kept, when I accompanied a JDC delegation to Bosnia.

A bank functionary led us through corridors and down narrow stairways into a basement vault lined with safety deposit boxes.

Wrapped in white tissue paper, the Haggadah was removed from a sealed, blue metal lock box and placed on a table.

Wearing clean, white gloves, a staff member from the Sarajevo national museum then opened the book, turning over page after page to reveal the elegant Hebrew calligraphy and brilliantly colored and gilded illustrations.

An article in April in The Art Newspaper provided some background to the museum crisis.

The National Gallery closed to the public last September. It had been without a director and chief financial officer since May. The Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, also in Sarajevo, was forced to shut its doors on 4 January after running out of money for maintenance and heating. Staff at both institutions have worked without pay since the respective closures.

The National and University Library, which has had no heating since early January, is next on the list of anticipated closures. [...] 

The current crisis is a result of national elections held in 2010, which failed to create a coalition with a parliamentary majority. Without a functioning government, there was no funding for cultural institutions last year.

Museum administrators in Sarajevo say that grants from the new government, formed this February, will not solve the structural problem affecting the institutions. They believe that the institutions need to be funded at a national level if they are to operate effectively in the future. They also want a national cultural ministry to be created.

For further information on the culture crisis in Bosnia see the web site www.cultureshutdown.net 

Shana Tova!

Jewish themed ceramic souvenirs at a shop in the medieval Jewish quarter of Trani, Italy. Photo © Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

With still a week to come in the autumn holiday season, I'd like to take the opportunity to wish all my readers a sweet, satisfying and stimulating new year -- and beyond!

I've taken a break from posting this past month or so, but I look forward to getting back into the swing of things very soon and posting regular reports, commentaries, images and links.

Meanwhile -- for a growing range of resources and news reports, please take a look at the web site that I am coordinating as a project of the Rothschild Foundation Europe:  www.jewish-heritage-europe.eu

Detailed look at a Jewish cemetery in Ukrainian Transcarpathia

Photo courtesy of riowang.blogspot.com

Bottom of same gravestone. Epitaph reads: "Here is hidden the virtuous and praised woman, whose hand was open to the poor [Prov 31:20 in free rendering], Lady Scheindel, daughter of Moshe of the blessed memory. Deceased on Hoshana Rabbah [the last day of Sukkot] in 5605 [1845]. May her soul be bound in the bondage of the living." Photo and translation courtesy of riowang.blogspot.com 

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

The elegant and informative riowang blog runs a very nice post -- with lots of photos -- about the Jewish cemetery in Tekovo/Tekehaza  in Ukrainian Transcarpathia.

I have already linked to the very detailed and richly illustrated riowang posts about the Jewish cemetery and synagogue in Lesko, Poland - and since the author gave me permission to use his photos, I am re-posting some photos of Tekovo/Tekehaza here.

The post  comments in particular on the large number and variety of gravestones marked by candlesticks.

Riowang noted that in Tekovo/Tekehaza

it is worth noting a special gravestone motif, which almost has its own school in the cemetery of Tekeháza: the large and diverse number of geometric candelabra. The presence of candelabra – as we have already seen in the cemetery of Lesko – is not unique in itself. We meet with them almost only on women’s graves, praising the Friday night candle-lighting and, beyond that, the light and warmth of the family home as well as the virtuous woman maintaining it. What is interesting in Tekeháza, however, is the large number and many variations of stylized, geometric candelabra.

The many photographs on the post show candlesticks that are geometric and braided at the same time, as well as some that look like plants:

Once speaking about the candelabra, it’s worth to point out a special local form of this motif. About these gravestone decorations it is difficult to decide whether they are three-branch candelabra or stylized three-leaved plants.

For the stone pictured above, it notes:

On the top, two doves with their heads turned back surround a richly decorated seven-branch candelaber of an intertwined stem. The dove is a symbol of piety, while the candelaber of Friday evening and of the family home. At the bottom of the gravestone a snake is waving. The snake is a relatively rare motif on Jewish graves. In the Jewish cemetery of Warsaw we find an example of the snake biting its own tail, a symbol of eternity, while in the likewise Polish Jewish cemetery of Żabno, the snake attacking the lion on one of the stones represents the death. It is likely that the snake in Tekeháza is somehow related to this latter one. 

Read full post

This post also appears on my En Route blog for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal

U.S. Special Envoy Hannah Rosenthal Visits her Family's Heritage Sites in Poland

This post also appears on my En Route blog for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Hannah Rosenthal, the U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, took time out on a trip to Poland and Germany this month to honor her ancestors at sites of her own family history.

Rosenthal’s family came from what is now Bytom, Poland. All were murdered at Auschwitz in 1942 except for her father, who was the last Rabbi in Mannheim, Germany, and survived interment in Buchenwald.

In a post Tuesday on the State Department’s official blog, Rosenthal recounted that she visited sites in Bytom where her family had lived and also visited the Jewish cemetery there, hoping to find the graves who her grandmother and uncle, who had died before World War II “and therefore would have graves.”

Visiting Bytom, she wrote, was “both exhilarating and devastating.”

When we went to see the gorgeous synagogue, where Dad had celebrated his Bar Mitzvah and loved to tell us great stories about, there was no synagogue. Just a dilapidated gray apartment building. When we went to the cemetery, we hoped to find the graves of my grandmother and uncle who died before the war—and therefore would have graves. But Polish activist Wlodzimierz Kac had something else in mind. He had researched my family and ended up showing us 18 Rosenthal graves. My grandmother Selma, my uncle Martin, great and great-great grandparents, great and great-great uncles, and aunts and cousins. Eighteen Rosenthals who we could honor. I am the last Rosenthal in my family. 

Bytom now has not a single Jew and hardly any Jewish presence. Where once a bustling community thrived, there is not one single survivor. We visited two of the places Dad’s family had lived. He had described his home’s music room and parlors. Now the buildings are dark, dank, depressing. And mostly empty. We wondered how we could help restore a school or a prayer house, or clean up the cemetery, when there is no one to keep it up. The absence is profoundly present.

During her trip to Poland, she wrote, she met Jewish community leaders and representatives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation, the Forum for Dialogue Among Nations, and the Judaica Foundation.

I learned about the present-day Jewish community in Poland and civil society engagement on Jewish history and culture. These organizations are doing important work, fostering interaction between Jews and non-Jewish Poles through dialogue, education, and cultural exchange. Several programs focus specifically on fostering interaction among Polish non-Jewish and Jewish youth. It was moving to meet the extraordinary people working to keep the memory and spirit of Poland’s absent Jews alive.

On July 9, during her visit to Germany, Rosenthal took part in a ceremony in Mannheim at which a “stumbling stone” memorial was dedicated to her father. Stumbling stones are plaques the size of cobblestones that are placed on the street in front of houses in which Holocaust victims and survivors lived.

This post also appears on my En Route blog for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal

The replica of the Neolog Synagogue in Bratislava, next to the highway. Photo(c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

I’ve already posted on this blog about the new ITunes app called Oshpitzin that uses smart phone technology to teach and tour pre-WW2 Jewish Oswiecim—the town where Auschwitz was built—which before the Holocaust was a majority Jewish town.

In this JTA story I write about how this project and the Lost City project in Bratislava—which puts back on the map the old Jewish quarter of the Slovak capital, which was utterly demolished by the Communist authorities in the late 1960s to built a new highway and bridge across the Danube. Centerpiece of the Lost City project is a replica of the destroyed Neolog synagogue, on the spot where it really did once stand.

In Poland and Slovakia, restoring awareness of a forgotten Jewish past 

By Ruth Ellen Gruber · July 23, 2012 

KRAKOW, Poland (JTA)—Thanks to a new iTunes app, new tourist routes and a towering replica of a destroyed synagogue, two “lost” Jewish cities in Europe are back on the map. 

One is the historic Jewish quarter of Bratislava, the Slovak capital, which survived World War II only to be demolished by communist authorities in the late 1960s. The other is Oshpitzin—the prewar Yiddish name for Oswiecim, the once mainly Jewish town in southern Poland where the Auschwitz death camp was built. 

The two projects differ in scope and structure, but their goals are the same: to restore awareness of the forgotten Jewish past in an effort to foster a better understanding of the present—for tourists and the locals. 

Read full story here

Wonderful Exhibit in Warsaw of Gwozdziec synagogue panels

A version of this post appeared on my En Route blog for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal

Preview of the Exhibition. Photo courtesy of Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

A wonderful exhibition opens today at the Arkady Kubickiego (Kubicki Arcade) of the Royal Castle in Warsaw and runs til the end of the month—the colorful ceiling panels that have been painted this summer as part of the Gwozdiec synagogue reconstruction project.

The reconstruction of an 85 percent scale model of the tall peaked roof and richly decorated inner cupola of the wooden synagogue that once stood in Gwozdziec (now in Ukraine) is a project of the Handshouse Studio and the forthcoming Museum of the History of Polish Jews—I wrote about the first stages of the project last summer, when students, master timber-framers and volunteers gathered in Sanok, southeastern Poland, to build the structure, using hand tools that would have been used centuries ago. The reconstructed roof and cupola will be a major installation at the new Museum, which is due to open in the autumn of 2013.

Its elaborate structure and the intricate painted decoration on the cupola ceiling will reproduce a form of architectural and artistic expression that was wiped out in World War II, when the Nazis put the torch to some 200 wooden synagogues in Eastern Europe. Many of them, like that in Gwozdziec, were centuries old and extraordinarily elaborate, with tiered roofs and richly decorative interior painting. 

The Gwozdziec Synagogue, built in the 17th and 18th centuries, was a “truly resplendent synagogue that exemplified a high point in Jewish architectural art and religious painting,” the architectural historian Thomas C. Hubka, an expert on the building, has written.

This summer, at workshops held in synagogues around Poland, teams of students and volunteers have been carrying out the colorful, elaborate paintings that cover in the interior of the cupola—and it is these that will be displayed for the next two weeks in Warsaw.

It’s terrific—and fascinating—work, and this will be a rare chance to see the panels up close before they are mounted as part of the cupola installation!

Smartphone App for Oshpitzin/Oswiecim

A version of post also appears on my En Route blog for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

The latest Jewish travel app for smartphones and tablets takes you to a place that no longer exists except in memory: Oshpitzin.

Oshpitzin was the Jewish name for Oswiecim, the small town in southern Poland where the Nazis built Auschwitz which had a majority Jewish population before the Holocaust -- I’ve written a lot about the town and its difficulty in balancing its Holocaust identity with its pre-WW2 past, starting in the mid 1990s, when I dealt with the issue in the long chapter “Snowbound in Auschwitz” in my book Upon the Doorposts of Thy House: Jewish Life in East-Central Europe, Yesterday and Today, which was a sort of diary and meditation on nearly four days blocked in Oswiecim by a freak snowfall…...

Last year, the Auschwitz Jewish Center—a prayer, study and research center in Oswiecim—launched a project aimed at putting Oshpitzin back on the map. It started with a printed guidebook and followed on withan interactive web site, www.ospitzin.pl, that includes a map, pictures, history, testimonies and more.

Now, the Center as followed through with a smartphone App that can be used by armchair travelers as well as actual visitors to the town. It has an interactive map, videos, audio, photographs, etc.

Most of the sites the project—be it the guide book, the web site or the App—describes no longer exist. But it all entails a way to learn about the Jewish history (and general history) of a town that existed for hundreds of years before “Auschwtiz” changed its identity from a place of Jewish life into a place of Jewish murder.

As of now, the App is available in the iTunes store for IPhone and IPad—but it will soon be available on Android, too.

Staying in Krakow

This post also appears on my En Route blog for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal




By Ruth Ellen Gruber

I've just been to Krakow for the last few days of the annual Jewish Culture Festival - the best party around. This year I did a couple of lectures to groups who were attending (and observing) the festival. It led to some reminiscing with friends who -- like me -- have been going to the Festival since the early 1990s.

One of the things we talked about what where we had stayed in Krakow in those early years -- because, until the late 1990s, there were very few if any places to stay in Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter where the Festival now takes place. Nowadays, there is a wide variety of choices all over the city -- from top flight hotels to inexpensive hostels and rental rooms and apartments.

In the early years, the artists at the Festival used to be put up at the Forum Hotel -- I should say, the late Forum Hotel, because the Forum as it was then does not exist anymore. It is a hulking empty relic on the Vistula that serves as a prop for huge advertising posters....

I used to stay at the Hotel Pollera, an old-fashioned place in the Old Town near the main market square, or Rynek, about a 20-minute walk (or more) from Kazimierz.

For the past dozen years, though, I've stayed in Kazimierz itself whenever I've been in Krakow -- usually at one of two hotels that, I have to say (full disclosure), are run by friends.

One is the Klezmer Hois, operated by Wojtek and Malgosia Ornat, the couple who founded the first Jewish-style cafe in Krakow. I still remember vividly sitting with Wojtek in 1992 or so, at an umbrella-shaded wicker table, eating strawberries and looking out at the devastation of Szeroka street, the main square of Jewish Kazimierz, which then was a ring of dilapidated buildings.

The Ornats opened Klezmer Hois -- their third locale -- in the mid-1990s, in a building that once housed a mikvah. It evolved into a hangout for Krakow Jews and visiting Jewish artists and others -- and it still fulfills that purpose, at least for us older crowd. Sitting in the garden during Festival time, is a delight, a constant round of people dropping by, conversing, eating, drinking. Klezmer Hois is, actually, the one "Jewish style" cafe in Krakow that I go to. The Ornats also run the Austeria Jewish publishing house (which has published my book "Letters from Europe (and Elsewhere)") and the associated Austeria bookstore.

The hotel rooms are old-fashioned and up creaking flights of stairs -- and the breakfast is spectacular, a delicious combination of table service and partial buffet.

Breakfast at Klezmer Hois Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

The other hotel in Kazimierz that I stay in is the Hotel Eden, on Ciemna street, a wonderfully friendly place, founded in the mid-1990s by the American Allen Haberberg, that started out as a kosher hotel. Though no longer kosher, the Eden still caters to Jewish travelers and has a mikvah -- which has been used for conversions as well as ritual baths. Each room has a mezuzah on the door, and there is also wifi throughout the building. I asked Allen not long ago why the Eden was no longer kosher (although it will still provide kosher food for those who ask) -- he told me one reason was that there are now good kosher caterers as well as an upscale kosher restaurant (the Olive Tree) in Krakow.

Rabbi Edgar Gluck and Allen Haberberg in front of the Eden Hotel. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Also on this trip though, for the first time in a long time, I stayed for a couple of nights near the Rynek, at the Hotel Saski -- where I think I stayed with my mother in about 1992.

It doesn't seem to have changed much -- but the Old Town has.... Krakow is the city that doesn't sleep ... at 3 a.m. the streets were as lively as in the middle of the afternoon.

Lobby of the Saski. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Smart phone apps for Jewish sites in Warsaw and Berlin

 This post also appears on my En Route blog for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal

 By Ruth Ellen Gruber

I’ve been on the road for the past 10 days, and I have a backlog of material to catch up on with postings…. both items I have seen online and on-site visits I’ve made myself.

One new development is the release of smart phone apps that guide you around several Jewish sites in Berlin and Warsaw. Smart phone and tablet apps are clearly the self-tour guides of the future that are becoming the present….

The new ones I’ve noticed recently include an app that guides you around the Warsaw of Holocaust hero Janusz Korczak. Called “My Warsaw,” it is a project of the forthcoming Museum of the History of Polish Jews—it’s available for free on the iTunes store, but I’m not sure about other platforms. This is what Virtual Shtetl says:

The application spans two tourist routes. The first one guides you through places related to Janusz Korczak’s early and late childhood while the other shows Korczak’s life story during World War II. Both routes comprise almost fifty described places. The “My Warsaw-Warszawa jest moja” project shows now nonexistent Warsaw through pictures, audio recordings, a quiz, quotations and the augmented reality system. It sets an example of a novel approach of learning by having fun by means of state-of-the-art technologies.

You can download this bilingual Polish-English application on GooglePlay and AppStore for free.
The application is designed to be a modern tool for learning and teaching history. The only thing you have to do is take your Smartphone with you and take a walk with your family around Warsaw or organize a memorable outdoor history lesson. Tourists may use it as a city guide while Warsaw residents may discover their home town anew.

Another new app guides users around three historic Jewish cemeteries in Berlin .

Berlin has several Jewish cemeteries, including the huge Weissensee cemetery.

This is what Reuters says about the Berlin cemetery app—but I’m not sure where to get the app, or what platforms it serves. I did not find it on iTunes:

The smartphone programme leads visitors to the graves of Jewish figures such as philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, hotelier Berthold Kempinski, publishers Rudolf Mosse and Samuel Fischermen and also of those who committed suicide to escape deportation to Nazi death camps.

“There is an Internet code at the entrance of each cemetery which can be scanned by a smartphone and directly connects to the cemeteries’ website,” the cemeteries’ inspector Hilel Goldmann said.

The Internet programme is steered by a GPS navigation device and enables the visitors to plan their own ‘tour’ choosing among about 160 of the 150,000 graves in the three Berlin cemeteries, Goldmann said.

NYTimes online on reassessing and reaffirming Jewish Culture in Poland

This post also appears on my En Route blog for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal

Poster for a play called "Zyd, "or "Jew" by Artur Palyga, which deals with anti-Semitism. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber


The development of Jewish - and Jewish-themed—cultural expression and “production” in Poland and other countries is a theme that I have written about for many years, most notably in my book Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe (BTW—Virtually Jewish is now available as a Kindle e-book.)

I have focused in large part on the relationships between non-Jewish artists, musicians and others with Jewish culture and the way that they have used Jewish themes in their work.

But, in recent years, Jewish artists have also increasingly been exploring Jewish themes and topics, some of them as a way to explore their own identity.

In an article for the New York Times online the journalist Ginanne Brownell reports on this trend, writing about how Jewish artists are reasserting and redefining Jewish culture in Poland. Brownell interviewed me when I was in Poland last month and quotes me in the article—and she also quotes quite a few of my friends!

[A] growing number of Jewish Poles in the artistic sphere ... are exploring the dichotomy of being both Polish and Jewish in 21st-century Poland.

Writers, playwrights, filmmakers and visual artists are tackling everything from anti-Semitism and the Holocaust to coming to terms with their families’ Communist pasts and issues of identity.

“You cannot imagine Polish culture without Jewish culture,” said Pawel Passini, a Lublin-based director and playwright who last year won two awards at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival for his staging of “Turandot.” “I think most people are conscious of that, the problem is how to say it and let people deal with it.”

She goes on:

From the late 1980s — thanks to things like the Krakow Jewish Festival that will take place from June 29 until July 8 this year — Jewish culture, or what is perceived as Jewish culture, has become more popular in Poland. Ms. Gruber described this in her 2002 book “Virtually Jewish” as “familiar exotica,” where there is pseudonostalgia for Jewish culture like the theatrical shtetl world of “Fiddler on the Roof” or wailing, clarinet-infused Klezmer music.

Contemporary Jewish artists are broadening the definition of Jewish culture in Poland. Mr. Passini is a case in point, having become one of the most acclaimed young stage directors in the country. He admits that many of his works — including plays like “Nothing Human” about a young girl trying to find her roots and “Tehillim,” which used choreography based on Hebrew letters — have a focus on spirituality.

Read the full story HERE