Tablet Magazine -- Olive Oil

Here's a link to my Hanukkah story in Tablet Magazine, on the olive oil harvest...

My Hanukkah Gift
A writer’s reflections on her olive grove and a holiday ritual

By Ruth Ellen Gruber. December 17, 2009


It’s surely just a coincidence that in Italy, where I have a home, the olive harvest generally takes place in the month or so before the most oil-centered of Jewish holidays.

For me, though, the olive harvest and subsequent production of oil provide a parallel seasonal ritual, in which bruschetta, or grilled bread drenched in dense new oil, provides the ceremonial flavor.

My family and I have property in an olive-producing area of Umbria, in central Italy, where the landscape is a hilly mix of forest and farmland, and many of the slopes are covered with groves of olive trees.

Umbria is home to several big olive oil concerns, with huge groves comprising thousands of trees. But many people, like me, have small private holdings that provide enough oil for their own needs, as well as a portion left over for sale.

On our land, we have several dozen olive trees. I keep most of them pruned, but otherwise, I admit, I’m a very poor farmer. I don’t plow or fertilize or do much else to care for them; I regard what they produce as something of a gift, and only about half of the trees, in fact, bear fruit.

Still, each November sees me out in the field, gathering olives and then having them taken to a local frantoio, or olive press, where they are turned into oil.

Read full story

Sturm , Twang, and Sauerkraut Cowboys -- article in The Western Way

The Western Way magazine has published a much shorter version of the lengthy essay/paper on European country music that I wrote with the aid of my Guggenheim Fellowship and NEH grant, and presented at the International Country Music Conference in Nashville last year (and in other venues).
A full version of the essay, with pictures, can be viewed by clicking HERE.

 

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- 20 Years Ago Today....

 Prague -- early 1990s. A sausage stand under the entrance to a disused synagogue. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Here's my latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column, on looking back to the Way It Was before the Wall came down....

A sea change in 20 years

By Ruth Ellen Gruber· November 10, 2009

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN

ROME (JTA) -- The English author L.P. Hartley once wrote that "The past is a foreign country: They do things differently there."

That's how I feel whenever I look back at the way that the world -- in particular, the Jewish world in Central and Eastern Europe -- worked before the collapse of communism 20 years ago.

The changes triggered when the Berlin Wall came down have, of course, produced a host of new and complex challenges that Jews in Europe have had to confront.

But as Robert Djerassi, a leader of the Bulgarian Jewish community, put it recently, "When I think back to Socialist days, even everyday experiences sound so improbable and grotesque that it's hard sometimes to convince people who didn't live through them that they actually took place."

I lived and worked as a journalist in communist countries from the late 1970s onward, first as a correspondent for United Press International and then as an independent reporter, for JTA and others, as well as the author of several books on the region.

It was in the late 1980s that I began dedicating much of my writing to Jewish subjects, just as communism was collapsing and new democratic freedoms allowed Jews to reassert and reclaim their identity and forge a new beginning in what before the Holocaust had been Europe's Jewish heartland.

Under communism in most countries in the region, the practice of Judaism and the expression of Jewishness were semi-clandestine, almost secret, almost taboo.

Leaders of the remnant Jewish communities in these countries were beholden to the regime and generally toed the party line. Less than a year after the fall of communism, the rabbi in Prague was forced to resign after admitting that he had been a police informer under the communists.

All communist states except Romania had broken ties with Israel after the Six-Day War in 1967. And in most countries Jewish practice and education, even the study of Hebrew, was strictly limited or even barred.

In Prague, for example, the scholarly publication of what was then the State Jewish Museum was published in English and French and other languages -- but not in Czech, in order to limit access by local people.

And many Jews I interviewed were unwilling to speak to me on the record, even on a subject such as the restoration of a monument to victims of the Holocaust.

"We had to get authorization from the authorities to speak with foreign visitors, and then afterward we had to write out reports on our conversations, whether it be with visiting scholars, journalists or whatever," a Prague Jewish museum curator told me in 1990. "It was the pressure of a totalitarian regime."

In Warsaw in the early 1980s, I was part of a group called the Jewish Flying University that consisted of young Jews and non-Jews who tried to teach themselves -- on their own -- Jewish ritual, tradition, history and culture. The group "flew" from apartment to apartment for meetings.

Western Jews like myself were conduits to the outside world, despite the limits of our knowledge.

"You're a real Jew," they told me, even though I don't keep kosher, go to services much or speak Hebrew. "You've known all your life that you are Jewish."

November 1989 saw a climax of change in Eastern Europe that had been coming for months.

Already that summer a negotiated settlement in Poland had led to free elections. And in September, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee had officially returned to Hungary after 36 years, and Hungary and Israel had resumed formal diplomatic relations.

Nov. 12 of that year found me in Prague sitting with a small group of eager yet anxious Jews in the top floor function room of the historic Jewish Town Hall. The Berlin Wall had come down three days earlier, but the Velvet Revolution that ousted the communist regime in Prague was still five days away.

We were there to meet with Edgar Bronfman, then president of the World Jewish Congress, who was making his first official visit to the country.

I saw fear and hope -- and also excitement -- on people's faces.

"The winds of freedom are blowing across the world like a gale," Bronfman declared. "I don't like to use the word 'democracy,' but prefer to say that there is a new era dawning on everyone that people won't be governed without their consent."

He went on, "It is important that the Jewish people in Eastern Europe are beginning to feel closer together. It is heartbreakingly sad that there are so few Jews left, [but] the Jewish world will go from strength to strength. We have a mission -- to teach others the way of the Lord."

Bronfman concluded: "Freedom is blowing, blowing for all of us."

It was an emotional moment at the cusp of the unknown: If the past is a foreign country, so is the future.

Read story at JTA.org

Tablet Magazine -- (Candle)sticks on Stone

Radauti. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Tablet Magazine has published my article on my project, (Candle)sticks on Stone, exploring the representation of women in Jewish tombstone art through the depiction of candles. There is a photo slide show with the article.

STICKS AND STONES

BY RUTH ELLEN GRUBER, September 30, 2009

It was the first week in September, and in cowboy boots and jeans, camera slung over my shoulder, I crunched through the springy thick tangle of undergrowth that carpets the old Jewish cemetery in Radauti, a market town in the far north of Romania, near the Ukrainian border. Around me stretched the crowded, ragged rows of tilted tombstones: gray and mossy green, some still bearing remnants of the blue and black and red painted decoration that once adorned the exquisite, ornate carving on their faces.

Radauti is the town from which my father’s parents emigrated to the United States before World War I, but this, for me, was not supposed to be a roots trip. Nor was I consciously fulfilling the tradition of visiting the tombs of my ancestors around the time of the High Holidays.

I was here this time to work on a project called (Candle)sticks on Stone, an exploration of the varied and evocative ways that women are represented in Jewish tombstone art through depictions of Shabbat candles, which I hope eventually to turn into a book.

The project, which is supported in part by a Jewish women’s studies grant from the Hadassah Brandeis Institute, includes making a photographic documentation of Jewish women’s tombstones in Radauti and in several other nearby towns, including Siret, Botosani, and Gura Humorului. The older tombstones in these and other Jewish cemeteries in parts of today’s Romania, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, and Poland form an astonishing collection of ornate sculptural design. Many cemeteries have disappeared; in many others the stones are eroded and crumbling. But those that remain comprise wonderful examples of vivid local stone-carving that fuse local folk art and Jewish iconography.

The wide range of carved symbols represent names, professions, personal attributes, or family lineage. There are lions, birds, stags, bears, snakes, and imaginary beasts; there are flowers, grapevines, garlands, and geometric patterns; there are the pitchers of the Levites, the crown of the Torah, and the hands of the Cohanim raised in blessing; and there are powerful symbols of death: the hand of God plucking a flower or breaking off a branch from the Tree of Life.

Here and elsewhere, candles and candlesticks are common symbols on Jewish women’s tombs, because lighting the Sabbath candles is one of the three so-called “women’s commandments” carried out by female Jews—and the only one easily represented in visual terms. (The others include observing the laws of menstrual purity, or Niddah, and that of Challah, or burning a piece of dough when making bread.)

Many are simple, schematic silhouettes, but here in the heart of Eastern Europe they also take on extravagant, elegant forms: carved candlesticks braided like loaves of challah; candlesticks that look like leafy plants, candlesticks flanked by grapevines and griffins, candlesticks that look like flowers, candles that are broken to symbolize death. Above them, on many of the tombstones, are the carved hands of women, held up in a pious gesture to bless the flames.

A primary aim of my (Candle)sticks on Stone project is simply to present these carvings as examples of art. The older stones, from the 18th and early 19th century in particular, are unique examples of sculptural skill and imaginative design: it is often possible to discern the hand of individual, if now anonymous, Jewish stone masons or their workshops. And while later stones, often carved according to stenciled templates, present a more uniform appearance, their style and format still varies greatly from town to town.

Another aim is more reflective. As a Jewish woman who has almost never lit the Shabbat candles in my home, I also cannot fail to consider what this representation means. Candlesticks on stone are a formalized shorthand for “Jewishness” and “gender.” But they also spell tradition.

Read Full Article and See Slideshow

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- Home for the Holidays

Photo (c) Doru Losneanu

My latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column details my trip to Romania in September. With three of my cousins, we dabbled in family history and, as the cliche goes, walked in the footsteps of our ancestors.

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN: Discovering an ancestor's footsteps

By Ruth Ellen Gruber, Oct. 1, 2009

RADAUTI, Romania (JTA) -- It's the custom in Judaism to visit the graves of family members around the High Holidays.

This year I went a step further and walked in the footsteps of my ancestors.

My father's parents, who immigrated to the United States before World War I, were born near the market town of Radauti in the Bucovina region of northern Romania.

This is where I went a couple of weeks before Rosh Hashanah. It was my fourth trip to Radauti, which when my grandparents lived there was one of the easternmost towns in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

My first visit there was more than 30 years ago, in the freezing December of 1978. I was a correspondent for United Press International and was accompanying Romania's then-chief rabbi, Moses Rosen, on his annual Chanukah tour to far-flung remnant communities throughout the country.

I recall visiting 19 Jewish communities in six days. Elderly people in winter coats and astrakhan hats huddled together in unheated synagogues, and puffs of steam came from the mouths of the Jewish choir from Bucharest that came along with us to perform.

My brother Sam also was on that trip, and he and I took time in Radauti to visit the Jewish cemetery and pick our way through the stones to find the grave of our great-grandmother, Ettel Gruber, who died in 1946 and in whose honor I was given my middle name.

Discovering her grave did not trigger in me any further genealogical impulse, though what we experienced on our trip around Romania that week sowed the seeds of my interest in Jewish heritage.

As far as I knew, Ettel's was the only tomb of my ancestors in that cemetery, and in subsequent visits to Radauti in 1991 and 2006 for other research projects I never thought to seek any other family traces.

My trip to Radauti last month was not supposed to be a roots trip, either. I went there to work on an online photographic project called (Candle)sticks on Stone, about how women are represented on Jewish tombstones through the depiction of Shabbat candles. (See the Web site http://candlesticksonstone.wordpress.com.)

But it was inevitable, I guess, that the ghosts of my long-dead ancestors hovered about, and even somehow intervened, as I carried out my business. After all, though candlesticks are common symbols marking the gravestones of Jewish women, the stone marking my great-grandmother Ettel's tomb in the Radauti cemetery was the first I had seen bearing that image.

This ancestral intervention was particularly evident thanks to the fact that three of my cousins -- Arthur, Hugh and Hugh's son Asher -- had come along with me for part of the journey. The four of us made a pilgrimage to Ettel's grave and took a ritual picture, but otherwise my cousins were not very interested in the other tombstones I was documenting.

Rather, they wanted to find out about our family history and, as the expression goes, to walk where our ancestors had walked.

A friend of a friend in town took us to the city’s registry office and helped us examine yellowing tomes that yielded handwritten dates, names and even street addresses of our forbears.

With the information that turned up and the aid of a couple of friendly policemen, we actually found the house in the nearby village of Vicovu de Sus where Ettel and her husband, our great-grandfather Anschel, had lived when they married in 1880.

Vicovu de Sus, like much of rural northern Romania, is a place where horses and carts are still common forms of transportation. The house we found was an isolated old wooden farmstead with a steep wood-shingled roof at the end of a grassy track at the edge of corn fields. Its only outward concession to modernity seemed to be electric power lines and a satellite dish.

My cousins left Romania after a few days, but I stayed on for a bit to continue work on my project, documenting the Jewish cemeteries in Radauti and several other towns.

But that's not all that I ended up doing.

I can't say that I had been bitten by the genealogy bug, but our session at the town hall, the faded names and dates and notations, and our subsequent discovery of our great-grandparents' house kept me thinking.

Our discoveries about our ancestors' lives had left some some questions that I wanted to try to answer, and I couldn't leave town without at least attempting to resolve them.

One of these loose ends was my discovery that another of my female ancestors -- my grandmother's grandmother, who died in 1904 -- was, like Ettel, buried in the Radauti Jewish cemetery, and that her Hebrew name, and even the plot number and row of her grave, were known.

Armed with this information, I again entered the cemetery and its tilting forest of stones on my last day in town. The cemetery caretaker pointed out the row and left me to push through the undergrowth and scrutinize the Hebrew epitaphs. It was slow going -- my Hebrew is basic at best, the stones were weathered and I had to keep brushing away spiders.

After half an hour or so, there it was: Chaya Dvoira bas Moshe Mordko. She was described in the epitaph as a "modest and honest" woman. Above the words were braided candlesticks on stone, with hands raised in blessing above them and faded traces of the red and green paint that must once have adorned the carving.

In a memoir she wrote by hand when she was well past middle age, my own grandmother recalled how she had lived with her grandparents in Radauti for two years as a young girl, "the happiest two years of my life as a child."

Chaya Dvoira, she wrote, "saw that my clothes were nice and clean, she had meals on time and my hair was always combed nice and neat." They had, she wrote, very little money.

I stood there for awhile in front of this memorial to an ancestor whose existence had never really crossed my mind before this trip.

"I pulled away a strand of stray vines: not sure what, if anything, I actually felt," I wrote that day on my blog. "Glad to be there; cognizant of distance, time, realms; the passing of time and history. Wishing the others could have been there too. Wondering what she looked like!"

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN - A Tale of Two Synagogues

Dohany St. Synagogue, 150 years (young). Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

My latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column is about the big birthdays of the great synagogues in Budapest and Sofia.

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Sept. 7, 2009

BUDAPEST, Hungary (JTA) -- This year marks a number of momentous anniversaries: the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II; the 40th anniversary of Woodstock; the 20th anniversary of the fall of communism.

We use anniversaries like these to stop, step back and evaluate not just the event that's being commemorated, but also the passage of time since it happened and the changes wrought with that passage.

In this context, two significant Jewish anniversaries are taking place in September.

The Dohany Street Synagogue in Budapest -- the largest synagogue in Europe -- turns 150 years old. And the Great Synagogue in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia turns 100.

OK, they are buildings, not earth-shaking events. But given the impact that some of the other "big" anniversaries had on these synagogues and on what they represent, it's only fitting to highlight their birthdays on the roster of celebrations.

For one, both are magnificent buildings that stand out architecturally as important city landmarks. Partly because of this, both have undergone recent renovations that restored them to opulent glory after decades of postwar neglect.

Both also are flagships of faith, or at least of Jewish identity, and are survivors, too. Witnesses to the pendulum swing of tragedy and triumph that has marked Jewish history in the region, they are potent physical symbols of a proud and enduring Jewish presence.

"The Dohany Synagogue is still the main synagogue of all the Jews of Hungary, the main identity place where we gather, whether we are religious or not," said architectural historian Rudolf Klein, author of the 2008 book about the synagogue, “The Great Synagogue of Budapest.”

As many as 90,000 Jews are believed to live in Budapest, but most are unaffiliated or totally secular.

With its red-and-yellow striped facade, sumptuous decor and two tall spires topped by gilded onion domes, the Dohany is, in fact, one of the most distinctive buildings in the city and was recognized as such from the outset.

Designed by the Viennese architect Ludwig von Forster, it was inaugurated on Sept. 6, 1859. Old engravings show dignitaries in shiny top hats gathered in front of its enormous ark, a domed and gilded structure that itself is the size of a small chapel.

At the time, Jews had not yet achieved full civil rights in Austro-Hungary. Yet the synagogue was the largest house of worship in Budapest and probably the biggest synagogue in the world. One local newspaper called it "a gorgeous piece of architecture."

"I like it as a Jew and as an architect," Klein told JTA. "In both areas it was a breakthrough."

The synagogue's Moorish style launched a genre and set the pattern for hundreds of synagogues built in later years throughout Central Europe and beyond.

The building's monumental scale, its prominent location and its opulent ornamentation, Klein said, epitomized "the optimism of 19th-century Jewry and the tolerant attitude of the gentile world which prevailed in the capital" at the time.

Things, of course, changed later. During World War II the synagogue was used as a concentration camp, where Jews were massed before their deportation to Auschwitz. The graves of Holocaust victims fill the courtyard.

After the war, under communism, the building languished for decades in a sorry state of disrepair. I vividly remember how its ceiling, held up by cables and plastic sheeting, sagged perilously over the congregation that would pack the sanctuary on Yom Kippur simply to make a statement of identity in the face of the regime’s religious suppression.

In 1996, it was officially reopened following a five-year restoration that was financed largely by the newly democratic Hungarian state.

"This building symbolizes the survival and the continuity of the Jewish people," Gusztav Zoltai, chairman of the Association of Hungarian Jewish Communities, declared at the time.

The Sofia synagogue was inaugurated in September 1909, nearly 50 years to the day after the Dohany, and fulfilled a similar role.

Czar Ferdinand himself cut a ribbon to formally inaugurate the building, whose huge dome, slim turrets and lavish, Byzantine-Moorish style fit in with many other grand buildings in downtown Sofia. The prime minister, other government VIPs and local bishops were in the crowd, too, and a procession of rabbis bore Torah scrolls into the sanctuary and placed them in the ark.

"This synagogue will connect us with the past generations and will tell of us to the future ones," the chief rabbi proudly told the congregation 100 years ago. "May God bless this land which we love dearly, for the good of all Bulgarians, in whose sufferings and joys we take an active part."

Bulgaria's 50,000 Jews were saved during World War II by the heroic action of some of the country's leaders, and most of them moved to Israel.

The Great Synagogue, damaged in 1944 by Allied bombing, stood neglected for decades, as Communist authorities unsuccessfully tried to turn it into a concert hall.

Still, recalled Robert Djerassi, one of the chairmen of the synagogue centenary celebrations, "It was an enormous domed building that awed me with its magnificence each time I stepped inside. Such a huge void: fearsome, lofty, dark and mysterious!"

Only a few thousand Jews live in Bulgaria today, but as in Budapest, restoration of the synagogue was a priority after the fall of communism as a public demonstration of both Jewish renewal and Jewish presence in the city.

The first stage of work was completed in 1996, the final one this year, just in time for September's five-day birthday bash.

Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov served as honorary chairman of the gala events, echoing the high-profile participation in the synagogue's original dedication a century ago. I'm not sure if I found this moving or ironic, but I'm rather glad he chose to do so.

Read Full Story at JTA

Bielsko-Biala -- My latest Centropa column

Jewish-style restaurant in Bielsko-Biala. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Here's a link to my latest column for Centropa.org, on Bielsko-Biala, Poland.

BIELSKO BIALA

Published Aug. 20, 2009

Before visiting Bielsko-Biala in southern Poland, I went online to check hotels. One of them, I found, was offering what it called a "Jewish Heritage Package."

Terrific, I thought. I was going to Bielsko-Biala for something else -- an international performance art festival. But I knew the town is rich in Jewish history, and I was looking forward to exploring it in more detail. Then I clicked the link and saw the itinerary.

Read full story

My Article on Silesia, on IHT/NYT web site

My article on the Industrial Heritage Route in Poland's Silesia province, in the International Herald Tribune and New York Times web site.

The monument to Wincenty Pstrowski, a miner and Communist-era labor hero, in Zabrze.Photo 9c0 Ruth Ellen Gruber

A Road Trip Through a Revolution, Mine by Mine and Factory by Factory

By Ruth Ellen Gruber (July 30, 2009)

ZABRZE, POLAND — A bell rings out with a strident clang, and the metal cage begins a slow descent into the earth.

The Nikisowiec workers' housing estate, which was built between 1908 and 1915 for workers at the Wieczorek coal mine.

As I stand inside, helmet on head, shoulder to shoulder with a group of slightly nervous strangers, the refrain of a Merle Travis song keeps running through my head: “It’s dark as a dungeon, damp as the dew/ the dangers are double, the pleasures are few/ where the rain never falls, the sun never shines/ it’s dark as a dungeon way down in the mine.”

I’m headed down 320 meters, or about 1,050 feet, on a guided tour of the Guido Coal Mine, which was founded in 1855 in Zabrze and closed decades ago.

Today it’s a mining heritage park: its soaring shaft tower the dominant feature of a complex that includes a subterranean museum showcasing more than a century of coal-mining technology — from hand-held picks to huge automated drills that resemble creatures from a sci-fi film — and a research center for industrial tourism.

The mine is a key stop among the 31 sites on the Industrial Monuments Route, which opened three years ago as a kind of tourists’ alternative to the country’s castles and churches. Crossing Silesia Province in the south, the route pays homage to the heritage of the country’s most heavily industrialized region.

This region is essentially Poland’s Rust Belt. The route includes not only mines but foundries, factories, railway stations, power plants, even a wooden radio tower in Gliwice. Some of the facilities are still in operation.

The route also includes museums devoted to specific areas of trade and manufacturing — beer museums at well-known breweries in Zywiec and Tychy; a bread-making museum near Bytom; a press and publishing museum in Pszyczyna; and a textile industry museum in Bielsko Biala. A small Museum of Sanitary Technology, located in a century-old waste-water pumping station in Gliwice, shows the history of sewage treatment technology.

Most sites date to the region’s Industrial Revolution in the latter part of the 19th century, when belching smoke from thousands of red-bricked chimneys darkened the Silesian sky, and mines and mills transformed, and blighted, the landscape.

Many of these installations functioned throughout the Communist years. But though Silesia is still heavily industrial, most of its aging plants have either closed or modernized, and much of the old machinery has been scrapped.

The route, in fact, was set up to single out and preserve the more noteworthy of those that remain.

I’ve always been fascinated by the mechanics of heavy industry and the almost sculptural forms of mine towers and factory smokestacks. In the course of a few days I took in many of the listed monuments, visiting some as easy day trips from Krakow and others while staying nearby.

Zabrze, near Katowice, has several listed sites. Before visiting the Guido Mine, I toured an open-air display of shaft machinery at the Krolowa Luiza mining complex. And I admired the monumental sculpture of a weary yet heroic coal miner — the Communist-era workers’ hero Wincenty Pstrowski — that dominates a city park across the street from a museum of mining history.

Two train stations provided a stark contrast. The one in Bielsko Biala, built in 1890 and recently restored, looks like a temple to transportation with elaborate frescoes. The station in Rada Slaska Chebzie, however, stands almost derelict, its red brick, glass and cast-iron facade covered in graffiti.

One site I found particularly striking was the Nikiszowiec Workers’ Housing Estate outside Katowice. One of several such estates included on the route, the Nikiszowiec development was built between 1908-15 for workers at the adjacent — and still functioning — Wieczorek coal mine. It’s a sprawling tract of three-story, red brick apartment buildings, arranged around a large red brick church and connected by courtyards and archways.

Mine workers still live there — I ran into some of them, still in their helmets, coming home after their shift — and the place has a gritty, proletarian air. But there is also evidence of nascent gentrification: window frames are freshly painted in a vivid red, and cafes have begun to appear.

The Industrial Monuments Route is designed as a car route. Some sites, though, can be reached on foot or by public transportation. I drove, but in Bielsko Biala, for example, both the train station and the Textile Industry Museum, with its fascinating collection of looms and mill machinery, were within walking distance of my hotel.

To get around, I used a free illustrated map available in English at tourist information offices. It provides a brief description and photograph of each site, and locates them on general and local maps. (Detailed information is available on the English-language Web site www.silesia-region.pl/szt/en/inf_turyst.html.)

But even with the map, finding my way around was not always easy. Many of the sites are well off the beaten path, and roads, highways and signage, particularly in the heavily congested areas in and around Katowice, can be confusing — I wished more than once that my car had GPS

Read full article on New York Times web site

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- Summer Reading and the Holocaust

Holocaust memorial in Budapest, on the bank of the Danube. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

My latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column deals with three books by people I know -- The Shanghai Moon, a detective story by S.J. Rozan, The Budapest Protocol, a political thriller by Adam LeBor and The Pages In Between, a memoir by Erin Einhorn. The books are very different, but they deals with how the Holocaust and associated with it, have an impact today.

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN: Summer Reading and the Holocaust

By Ruth Ellen Gruber (July 29, 2009)

BUDAPEST (JTA) -- Summer's here and my recreational reading has included three books by people I actually know.

Each book is quite different from the others -- "The Shanghai Moon" by S.J. Rozan is a detective story; "The Budapest Protocol" by Adam Le Bor is a political thriller; and "The Pages In Between" by Erin Einhorn is a nonfiction personal memoir.

But they all have something in common: They use the Holocaust and the lingering impact of its memory as springboards for narratives that take place in the present. And fiction or nonfiction, all three books are gripping yarns that make readers think, as well as become lost in the story.

"The Shanghai Moon" is the latest in Rozan's award-winning series of mysteries featuring New York-based detectives Lydia Chin and Bill Smith. It hinges on the experiences of the more than 20,000 European Jews who found refuge in Shanghai, China, during the Shoah and on the fate of their looted belongings. The book is the first in her series in which Rozan explores Jewish themes. Like the other two authors, Rozan is Jewish.

"The Shanghai ghetto is a compelling aspect of Jewish and Holocaust history that gets almost no attention," Rozan told me when I asked her what prompted her to write about it. "Once I started the research, I was completely enthralled with these people's stories and thought that whole rich world needed to be brought to light.

"The past never stops reaching into the present,” she said. “In a sense, crime and mystery novels are all about making that clear, about bringing above the surface, as it were, how and when that happens.”

Rozan said she occasionally hears from people who were in the Shanghai ghetto or had family members there.

"They almost never encounter that time and place in fiction, and they're thrilled to see it," she said. "And I'm thrilled when they tell me my picture of it feels right to them."

"The Budapest Protocol" tells quite a different story. Le Bor, a veteran British journalist and author, sets his story in the Hungarian capital, where he lives. But he creates an alternative Budapest, using today's city -- including its former Jewish quarter -- as a backdrop for an imaginary political scene in which Nazi-inspired political forces gain power in a bid to take over Europe.

Le Bor told me he extrapolated from a 1944 U.S. intelligence document an account of a meeting of leading Nazi industrialists in the Maison Rouge Hotel in Strasbourg, France. They admit the war is lost but lay out their plans for the next Reich, the fourth, which will be an economic empire.

"I simply moved that meeting to the fictional Hotel Savoy in Budapest and took the story from there," the author said.

Le Bor described the book -- his first novel after several nonfiction books -- as weaving "past and present together, just like everyday life everywhere in Eastern Europe.

"We walk on pavements once trodden by the Gestapo and the [Hungarian fascist] Arrow Cross, we marvel at the beauty of the Danube, which within living memory was also a watery grave for thousands of Jews," he said.

"But Hungary, certainly more than its neighbors, is making real efforts to remember what was lost at numerous memorials and Holocaust commemoration ceremonies. It also celebrates what remains at events like the Jewish summer festival," an annual event at the beginning of September.

"Jewish culture," Le Bor said, "is an ever-richer part of Budapest life."

Erin Einhorn's nonfiction memoir, "The Pages In Between," gripped me as much as -- or more than -- any fictional thriller.

The Detroit News called it "a detective story framed as a memoir." The story's subplots, it said, "reveal how memory often distorts the truth, and how family legend is often colored in its retelling."

The book recounts Einhorn's attempts to find out the truth about how her mother, who was born in the Polish city of Bedzin in 1942, survived the Holocaust.

Einhorn, then in her 20s, moved to Poland for a year in 2001. She found the house in Bedzin that once belonged to her family, met the descendants of the Christian woman who took in her mother as a baby and became immersed in an ever-widening web of truths, half-truths, myth and deception.

A reporter with the New York Daily News, Einhorn uses her journalistic skills to record not only her search for her mother's past but also her search to understand the present -- and, in a way, her search for her own identity.

Along the way she presents an honest and intensely vivid appraisal of contemporary Poland, especially the nuances and contradictions that compose the complexities of Poland's centuries-old relationship with the Jewish world.

Sadly, Einhorn's mother died at age 59, just as Einhorn was embarking on her project. That loss becomes a milestone that turns Einhorn's book into not just a search for family history, but a coming-of-age chronicle that links the past with an open-ended future.

I stayed up well past midnight to finish it.

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- Michael Jackson and the Jewish Nose

In Vienna this weekend, I visited the Jewish Museum to see the exhibit "Typisch!" -- about Jewish and other ethnic stereotypes. The exhibition already has shown at the Jewish Museum in Berlin and at the Spertus Museum in Chicago. What should I find as one of the exhibits? Michael Jackson, who else....

So -- here's my latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column about the experience.....

Poster for Typical!," an exhibit at the Jewish Museum in Vienna that features a photo of Michael Jackson used to illustrate how the singer tried to crush stereotypes. (Ruth Ellen Gruber)

Ruthless Cosmopolitan: Michael Jackson and the Jewish nose

By Ruth Ellen Gruber - June 29, 2009

VIENNA (JTA) -- Amid all the noisy outpouring over Michael Jackson's sudden death, the last place I expected to find him was in a Jewish museum. But there he was, his pale, mask-like, surgically engineered image featured as part of an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in the Austrian capital.

Called "Typical! -- Cliches of Jews and Others," the exhibition deals with the use (and abuse) of ethnic stereotypes in popular culture. The exhibition, which runs until October, has been shown at the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the Spertus Museum in Chicago.

It was assembled long before Jackson died June 25 in Los Angeles.

In a life-size photograph from 2002, he is shown with lank black hair framing a long, square stubbly chin, pinched red mouth, huge made-up eyes and a tiny nose with distorted pointy tip.

The photo is used to illustrate how, for better or worse, the King of Pop attempted to destroy stereotypes and, literally, to cut himself away from the confines of physical definition.

Jackson's "surgical transformations mirrored back to the culture the blurring of boundaries demarcating adulthood, sex and even race," Guy Trebay wrote in The New York Times after Jackson's death.

The "Typical!" exhibition deals with stereotypes commonly used to categorize African Americans, Muslims, women, Native Americans and others.

But given that it is mounted at a Jewish museum, much of its focus is on stereotypes about Jews. The exhibition poster employs a few sketched strokes to conjure up some: corkscrew curls, a hat and a huge hooked nose.

Indeed, the multitude of variations on the (alleged) size and shape of the Jewish nose form a major theme.

"The paradigm for the 'typically Jewish' nose originated in the craniological studies of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach," an information panel informs. A German natural scientist who died in 1840, Blumenbach "claimed to have evidence that Jews had an especially prominent nasal bone."

Exhibit installations examine the misuse of this and other paradigms in "scientific" teaching, as well as the ways in which they became part of the vernacular shorthand that shapes the way we see others and ourselves.

A section called "the schnoz," for example, shows a collection of 19th century walking sticks whose handles are formed by exaggerated noses. The contemporary artist Dennis Kardon's installation "Jewish Noses” features dozens of larger-than-life-sized casts made from the noses of actual Jews to demonstrate the silliness of such nasal cliches. Also, a modern painting ironically comments on the love and success that are supposed to result if one has a nose job.

"I am often asked whether or not Jews have a 'Semitic' nose," reads an exhibition quote by the historian Sander Gilman, who has written extensively about Jewish stereotypes. "After 54 years of experience, I can only answer that every Jew I have ever met has a nose."

The inclusion of Jackson's picture in the mix highlighted the transformations his own nose infamously went through.

It also reminded me of a book I read some years ago, a vicious anti-Semitic satire called "The Operated Jew," that was written in 1893 by a German doctor named Oskar Panizza.

An attack on efforts by Jews to assimilate into mainstream society, the book is a creepy and extremely disturbing tale about how a Jew named Itzig Faitel Stern tries to rid himself physically of the stereotypical signs of his Jewishness and become a "modern" European.

Foreshadowing Jackson's experiences under the knife, Stern submits to radical procedures, including the straightening and bleaching of his hair, "Extreme Makeover"-style cosmetic surgery and a series of horrendous operations to straighten his bones. He even gets a full transfusion of "Christian blood."

"It is impossible for me to give the reader an account of all the garnishings, changes, injections and quackeries to which Itzig Faitel Stern submitted himself," the narrator states. "He experienced the most excruciating pain and showed great heroism so he could become the equivalent of an occidental human being."

In the end, it doesn't help. At his wedding to a Christian woman, all falls apart and Stern "reverts" to the ugliest anti-Semitic cliche of the Jew.

Panizza, an early exponent of Nazi-style racial anti-Semitism, set out to "prove" that Jews could never become part of the mainstream modern world, even if they physically attempted to change their skins.

It's not exactly clear what world Jackson was trying to become part of -- or leave -- with his surgeries and other transformations.

Artistically he was the ultimate crossover, winning fans of all colors, ages, religions, nationalities and sexual orientations all around the world. Over the years, though, he alienated some African Americans by his physical manipulation of identity and apparent ambivalence about his own blackness.

Death, though, appears to have brought Jackson back to his roots -- or in any case to a warm embrace by the African-American community.

“We want to celebrate this black man," the actor and singer Jamie Foxx said to cheers at the Black Entertainment Television Music Awards Sunday. "He belongs to us, and we shared him with everybody else.”

Foxx added, "It didn't matter what he looked like, it was all about what he sounded like. It didn't matter what his nose looked like -- I loved the old nose and the new nose."

Read story on JTA

My lated Moked comment -- Samorin, Slovakia

My latest Moked piece -- from May. The Wounded Synagogue

La sinagoga ferita

La storia rivelata in un cartellone. A Samorin, una piccola città slovacca vicino a Bratislava, un manifesto permanente narra in cinque lingue, compreso l’italiano, il modo in cui la sinagoga locale è stata riportata in vita dopo mezzo secolo di abbandono. La sinagoga era stata costruita nel 1912. Durante la Seconda Guerra Mondiale gli ebrei che vivevano lì furono sterminati. La sinagoga fu utilizzata come un deposito di munizioni, poi come magazzino di grano. La prima volta che l’ho vista, nel 1990, il suo stato di degrado e solitudine mi ha toccato veramente il cuore. Pochi anni dopo, una coppia canadese di origini slovacche e’ riuscita a salvarla. Rivolgendosi all’Unione ebraica di Bratislava, Suzanne e Csaba Kiss hanno preso in affitto la sinagoga e l’hanno trasformata in un centro per l’arte contemporanea. L’hanno chiamata la “At Home Gallery” — “La Galleria di casa.” Nessun ebreo vive più nel luogo. Ma la gente torna, ebrei e non ebrei, per assistere ai concerti, alle mostre e alle altre manifestazioni culturali. Lo stesso Dalai Lama è stato un ospite alcuni anni fa. Durante il restauro della sinagoga, i Kiss hanno preso una decisione importante. Hanno ripristinato perfettamente la facciata, ma dentro, invece, hanno lasciato tracce molto suggestive che testimoniano del danno e del degrado subito. “Le tramandano ricordi,” dice Csaba Kiss. “Li vediamo. E’ molto speciale.” Questa storia si legge sul cartellone che accoglie i visitatori.

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- Bielsko Biala

Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

My latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column is from Bielsko Biala, Poland, about the impact of perception on memory.

Poland’s Jewish heritage is about more than just death

By Ruth Ellen Gruber· June 1, 2009

BIELSKO-BIALA, Poland (JTA) -- Outside the elegant theater in the city of Bielsko Biala in southern Poland, a billboard advertises an upcoming play. Stark letters spell out the title: "Zyd" -- Jew.

The lettering looks almost menacing, like scrawled graffiti, and I am a little taken aback.

But then I remember where I am.

This is Poland.

And the play, in fact, is an award-winning exploration of anti-Semitism and the power of stereotypes -- part of the endless continuing discussion here about the Jewish past, the Jewish present, and the long, complex and troubled relationship between Jews and Catholic Poles.

"There is no theme that Poles are more likely to discuss than Jews," the play's author, Artur Palyga told the Polish media. "It can be said that Judaism is our national passion."

"Zyd" deals with teachers in a provincial Polish town preparing for the visit of a former student, a Holocaust survivor who had attended their school before the Shoah, when Jews made up more than half the town's population.

Its portrayal of grassroots prejudice is graphic and sometimes grotesque. Indeed, the play came under fire in the right-wing press, and its premiere last year sparked protests.

Still, it won the main prize at a national festival of contemporary Polish drama for being "an honest, brave and theatrically precise attempt to settle accounts with the difficult Polish past."

The play is essentially about memory. In particular, it’s about the various uses to which memory is put, and how memory differs in the minds of different people considering the same past.

These issues have suffused much of my own work over the past two decades, as I have researched Jewish heritage sites in East and Central Europe and chronicled the Jewish experience in places were few or no Jews live today.

How are Jews and Jewish heritage remembered? Which Jewish places and personalities are incorporated into the local consciousness? How do local people choose to portray an important part of the population that was savagely removed, almost overnight?

I found Bielko Biala permeated with examples of how perspective influences memory.

They ranged from indifferent disregard to the kitschy commercialization of a "Jewish-style" restaurant called Rabbi, to an earnest attempt to acknowledge the contribution of Jews to the city.

Bielsko Biala was officially established in 1951 with the amalgamation of two towns on opposite sides of the Biala River, which for centuries formed the border between the Austrian Empire and Poland, and then the regions of Silesia and Galicia.

Before 1939, the population was divided among ethnic Germans, Jews and Poles, and the city remains a stronghold of Protestantism. The Nazis absorbed it into the Reich, and almost all the Jews were killed. After World War II, Poland took it over and expelled the ethnic Germans.

Only a small Jewish community lives here today, but Jews played a major role in local history. In the 19th century, Jewish industrialists helped build the city into a major textile center, and a local Jewish architect, Karol Korn, designed key buildings that still define Bielsko Biala.

Korn's grandest building -- the Moorish-style great synagogue -- no longer exists. Erected in 1881, it dominated the city's main avenue until it was blown up by the Nazis in 1939.

Today, a contemporary art gallery occupies the spot; a small plaque on an outer wall commemorates the destroyed building but says nothing about the community it once served.

There's a puppet theatre now next door, where the Jewish culture center once stood, and a courthouse occupies the former Jewish community building across the street. Its elaborate decoration, I was told, represents the seven fruits mentioned in the Torah.

The Jewish cemetery, whose red-and-orange striped ceremonial hall is another Korn design, is well maintained and designated a cultural monument. Among the tombs is a poignant memorial to Jewish soldiers who fell fighting for the Austrians in World War I.

All these sites, and more, are noted on Jewish heritage itineraries included in local guidebooks available at the tourist information office and the city museum. On sale in both places I found reproductions of old postcards portraying the synagogue in all its glory as a major pre-war landmark.

I have no way of knowing who follows these itineraries or purchases the postcards. But, at least for tourists, they clearly acknowledge the Jewish contribution to the town and set Jewish history and heritage here within the general matrix.

This marks a welcome contrast to the "Jewish heritage package" offered by one of the city's leading hotels.

Far from exploring the rich historic contribution of Jews here, its itinerary is simply a round trip to Auschwitz, with "sightseeing" at the memorial museum there, then dinner back at the hotel's restaurant.

Bielsko Biala is only 25 miles from Auschwitz. I would certainly urge anyone visiting the town to take a day and go there. But promoting a tour of the Nazis' most notorious death camp as a Jewish heritage package banalizes Jewish heritage and the Holocaust, and both ignores and insults the memory of the generations of Jews who lived here (and often prospered).

In Bielsko Biala, Poles have begun to offer up a more nuanced take on history -- Jewish and Polish. Unfortunately, however, hotel tourist packages tend to offer only what their clients demand. Jews should take the lead in demanding more.

Even in places where few or no Jews live anymore, Jewish heritage must not be equated with its destruction. Nor, indeed, should the centuries-old Jewish experience be defined solely in terms of death.

My latest Moked comment -- Romania

My latest photo and comment on the Italian web site moked.it harks back to the Passover seder I spent in 1991 in Radauti, Romania, the town from which my grandparents emigrated to the USA.

Passover 1991, Radauti. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Il Seder di Pesach. Una cerimonia antica. Una cerimonia vissuta in famiglia o fra amici, raffigurata qui in una immagine che è abbastanza vecchia, ma, nel mio cuore e nella mia memoria, rimane senza tempo. E' Pesach del 1991, a Radauti, una cittadina nel nord della Romania da dove, un secolo fa, i miei nonni erano emigrati in America. Siamo una ventina di persone, quasi tutti anziani, seduti in una stanza della sinagoga. Fa freddo. Portiamo maglie e capotti. C'è un solo ragazzo, il figlio del presidente della piccolissima comunità, che ha cantato le quattro domande del Ma Nishtanà. Il Seder è finito. Abbiamo mangiato il kugel di matzot, uova sode, manzo stufato con patate. Abbiamo bevuto un vino dolce che viene da Israele. Le fiamme delle candele si spengono. L'uomo che ha condotto il Seder è stanco. Canta con una voce molto debole. E lui è unico fra i presenti che ricorda ancora della mia famiglia. Dopo la cena, cantiamo il tradizionale, Had Gadya. Conosco una melodia. Un amico venuto con me da Bucarest ne propone un'altra. E il vecchio intona, con un filo di voce, un' altra melodia, una melodia molto particolare, che non ho mai sentito. Canta, forse, nel modo in cui cantavano, anni e anni fa, i miei antenati.

Translation:
The Passover Seder. An ancient ceremony. A ceremony observed with family or friends, shown here in an image that is rather old, but, in my heart and memory, remains timeless. It is Pesach 1991, in Radauti, a small town in the north of Romania, from which, a century ago, my grandparents emigrated to America. We are about 20 people, almost all elderly, seated in a room of the synagogue. It is cold. We wear sweaters and coats. There is only one boy, the son of the president of the tiny Jewish community, who chanted the Four Questions. The Seder is over. We ate matzo kugel, hard-boiled eggs, stewed beef with potatoes. We drank sweet wine imported from Israel. The flames of the candles are sputtering out. The man who conducted the Seder is tired. He said with a very weak voice. And he is the only person here who still remembers my family. After the meal, we sing the traditional song, Had Gadya. I know one melody. A friend who came with me from Bucharest knows another. And the old man sings, with a quavering voice another melody, a very particular melody, one that I had never heard before. He sings, perhaps, the way that, years and years ago, my own ancestors sang.

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- Online Epitaph

My latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column describes the web site we have created to honor my mother, the artist Shirley Moskowitz Gruber, and in doing so post an online epitaph.

In the piazza, Morruzze.

April 17, 2009

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

ROME (JTA) -- One year ago I joined my father, my brothers and their families, as well as a few other friends and relatives, at my mother's grave in Santa Monica, Calif.

It was close to the first anniversary of Mom's death, and we gathered with a rabbi for a ceremony to unveil her headstone.

Mom is buried in a municipal cemetery shaded by palm trees. Like most of the other grave markers there, a simple, flat plaque rather than a standing tombstone denotes her resting place.

All that is written about her is her name and the years of her birth and death. And there's a menorah, following the tradition of marking Jewish women's graves with depictions of candlesticks.

But there is no epitaph. Nothing that tells about who she was, where she came from, how she lived or the way she was regarded.

The fifth commandment enjoins us to honor our fathers and mothers.

This year, as the second anniversary of Mom's death approached, my brothers and I joined the growing ranks of children who now choose to honor their parents online, creating a Web site to celebrate our mother's life and commemorate her. Also, since my mother was an artist, we wanted to share images and information about her work.

Essentially what we did with the Web site was to etch an epitaph for Mom in cyberspace, picking up on an age-old tradition of personifying the deceased through words chiseled into solid stone.

My brothers and I all collected material and supplied content, but I was the one who designed the site, sticking to several basic priorities.

For one, the software had to be easy to use. We had to be able to post both text and photos. Since we wanted to encourage response and interaction, we also needed a format that combined a Web site with a blog.

The Web sites built by friends of mine for their parents run the gamut from simple memorials aimed primarily at family and close friends to elaborate multimedia constructions or sites aimed at placing a personal life story into the context of broader history.

The Web site for Lore Rasmussen, who died in January, details her life as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who went on to become an American civil rights activist and educator. The site that artist Josh Gosfield put up to honor his father, Gene, includes animation and a jivey rap poem.

"In the two minutes that it takes from beginning to end, I recall his life -- that which I know only through stories, that which I experienced firsthand, and that which I imagined," Josh told me.

I considered various formats, but in the end I chose a simple wordpress.com blog template. It's not overly ambitious, but it's straightforward -- as was my mother -- and so far it seems to fit the bill.

People already have begun to find it.

"I was so happy to come across this website. Your parents were very important to me when I was a young child," reads our first post, a moving tribute from a woman who knew my folks 25 years ago.

"I am so glad that you started this website," she added, "if only for the opportunity that it gave me to reflect on what your mother and father meant to me."

In my work over the past two decades, I've visited hundreds of Jewish cemeteries where lives and life stories endure in sculpted form, sometimes for centuries.

Some epitaphs use stock phrases and pious platitudes. But some tombstones bear elaborate carvings, with symbols denoting the name, heritage, attributes or profession of the deceased. Others feature epitaphs that read like full-blown CVs -- birth place, death place, education, professional positions, honors, titles, family.

Sometimes I get a chill when I read these persisting evocations of rich and complex lives.

Because of the Holocaust, most of the the people buried in Jewish cemeteries in Central Europe have left no direct descendants. The cemeteries themselves often are overgrown and abandoned. Still, here are the declarations of love and bereavement, of honor and respect.

For example, I never knew my great-grandmother, Ettel Gruber. She was the mother of my father's father, and I was given my middle name in her honor. Ettel died in Romania, well up in her 90s, in 1947, having survived the Holocaust.

Prewar pictures show her with a stern-looking visage. But her epitaph calls her "a positive and dedicated woman, fair and kind in all her doing; (she) offered hospitality and charity to the poor and set a full table for the Tzaddikim."

Cyberspace is not stone, and I have no idea how long the online epitaphs we are creating with our Web sites will endure.

I do know, however, that if you Google my mother's name, you'll find her. And if you follow the link, you'll get to know something about who she was and why we still care so much about her.

The Web site for my mother, Shirley Moskowitz Gruber, is at shirleymoskowitz.wordpress.com.

(Ruth Ellen Gruber's books include "National Geographic Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern Europe," "Letters from Europe (and Elsewhere)," and "Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe." She blogs on Jewish heritage issues at jewish-heritage-travel.blogspot.com.)

My Article on European Bluegrass, in the IHT/New York Times

Banjo Jamboree, Caslav, CZ, 2007. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Here's my article Bluegrass Thrives, Far from Home, which appeared in the print edition of the International Herald Tribune and the online edition of the New York Times.

By RUTH ELLEN GRUBER

Published: April 9, 2009

PRAGUE — A recent concert in Prague demonstrated the far-flung reach of an infectious musical genre that spells “Americana” from the first ringing twang of a finger-picked string.

It was a concert of bluegrass music — but the event was a far cry from the high lonesome hills of Appalachia.

Lilly of the West, a bluegrass band from Bulgaria, was joined by Czech musicians for a performance hosted by the Bulgarian Culture Institute at its premises in the heart of the capital.

“The music is very sincere, it’s about the lyrics, about the songs; every song tells a story,” said Lilly Drumeva, the singer who founded the band more than a dozen years ago. She had first heard bluegrass in Vienna, she said, when she studied there in the early 1990s.

Famed for its close harmony singing and lightning-fast fingerwork on the banjo, mandolin and fiddle, bluegrass music has an international following among a passionate niche of devotees.

In Europe, dozens of bluegrass concerts, festivals, workshops and jam sessions take place throughout the year. Homegrown bands take center stage, but American musicians also often tour. And local bluegrass associations, Web sites, blogs and publications promote the music and chronicle events. Scotland, the Czech Republic, Norway and other locations have even had bluegrass programs in public schools.

The scene is small but intensely active, said Dennis Schut, a Dutch musician who has been involved in bluegrass since the 1970s.

“I see it as a sort of religion or something,” he said. “You get addicted to bluegrass. The first time you hear it, you’re hooked.”

Mr. Schut’s 26-year-old son, Ralph, is a case in point. He moved to the Czech Republic — home to the liveliest bluegrass scene in Europe — for the music and now plays in a number of bands, including Roll’s Boys and G-runs ’n Roses.

Bluegrass in Czech lands grew out of a long, widespread acoustic music tradition. In 1964, concerts in Prague and Brno by Pete Seeger galvanized fans, who made their own five-string banjos based on photographs of Seeger performing.

Today, devotees claim that there are more bluegrass bands per capita in the Czech Republic than in any other country in the world.

By now, the music practically forms a local idiom — so much so that it was the country’s premier bluegrass band, Druha Trava, that was chosen to perform at Prague Castle before U.S. President Barack Obama’s speech there last Sunday.

Hard-core bluegrass fans, said Dennis Schut, do “everything they can to get people to play, hear and enjoy the music.”

In February, these aims underscored a meeting in Germany sponsored by the European Bluegrass Music Association, a coordinating group founded in 2001 and modeled on the Nashville-based International Bluegrass Music Association.

Billed as the first European Bluegrass Summit, it grouped about 30 people from a dozen countries, including concert and festival organizers, representatives of national bluegrass associations, music writers and even a few musicians.

“To present music, to make it grow, to further musical structures there has to be an organization of some sort,” said Olaf Glaesman, one of the participants, who organizes a bluegrass festival in Germany.

One major annual initiative comes each May — the whole month is designated by the Nashville association as Worldwide Bluegrass Music Month, and this year more than 145 events, ranging from big festivals to one-off concerts, are planned in Europe. (See the full schedule at www.ebma.org/101.0.html)

The highlight is the annual European World of Bluegrass Festival in Voorthuizen in the Netherlands. It will take place this year from May 21 to 23, and combines concerts with workshops, a band competition and a trade show with instrument makers, artists and others. This year’s line-up features more than three dozen bands.

Other major festivals during May include:

May 1-2. The Bluegrass Festival in Bühl, Germany. The lineup includes the American bluegrass artists Randy Waller and the Country Gentlemen, Wayne Henderson and Helen White, plus the Austrian group Nugget, among other bands from the United States and Germany.

May 9. The Spring Bluegrass Festival in Willisau, Switzerland. In addition to Bulgaria’s Lilly of the West and bands from Northern Ireland, Germany and Switzerland, the lineup features American groups including Randy Waller and the Country Gentlemen.

May 29-30. The Strakonice Jamboree, Strakonice, Czech Republic. The festival highlights more than two dozen top Czech groups as well as acts from Sweden and Austria.

May 30-31. The GrevenGrass Festival in Greven, Germany. Concerts and jam sessions feature groups from the Czech Republic, Germany, Great Britain and the United States.

Bluegrass Month in May, however, only begins the summer season of bluegrass festivals and tours. Top dates include:

June 19-20. Banjo Jamboree, Caslav, Czech Republic. Founded in 1973, the Banjo Jamboree is the oldest bluegrass festival in Europe. It features mainly Czech artists — but Czech bands rank among the top bluegrass performers in Europe. Most fans camp out, and there are jam sessions round the clock.

July 29-Aug. 2. La Roche International Bluegrass Festival, La Roche-sur-Foron, France (near Geneva). Entrance is free to this five-day festival of non-stop music by some 30 bands. The biggest bluegrass event in France, last year’s edition drew 12,000 fans.

Sept. 4-6. Didmarton Bluegrass Festival, Kemble Air Field, Gloucestershire, England. One of the biggest festivals, Didmarton features international bands, jam sessions and more.

My latest Moked.it comment (in Italian) from LA

My latest photo/comment on moked.it is from Los Angeles, where I spent Passover last year and went shopping with my father and my brother Frank in the kosher stores on Pico near Robertson:

Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Benvenuti all'Elat Market, una specie di "hard discount" kasher a Los Angeles, dove con mio padre e mio fratello ci siamo trovati fra la gente - molti di loro dalla comunità persiana - che freneticamente acquistava una galassia dei prodotti rigorosamente Kasher per Pesach. Lì e in altri negozi della zona abbiamo comprato anche noi matzot, cetriolini, rafano, un pollo per la minestra, e pesce macinato (per il babbo, cui piace preparare un gefillte fish vero e proprio). Mia nonna, la mamma del babbo, che era nata vicino Cernowitz, nel vecchio impero dell'Austria Ungheria, era immigrata in America da bambina, prima della Prima Guerra Mondiale. Aveva vissuto a lungo prima della sua morte a Los Angeles, e adesso diversi altri miei parenti vivono attorno alla metropoli californiana. Ogni volta che ci vado, mi rendo conto - con un po' di stupore - che nell'area di Los Angeles si trovano più ebrei di quelli che si trovano in tutta la Francia. Più o meno venti volte il numero degli ebrei che vivono oggi in Italia.

Ukraine -- On the Road and Off the Beaten Track

My latest travel column for centropa.org deals with traveling to Jewish heritage sites in western Ukraine, including finding the tomb of the 18th century wine merchant Ber of Bolechow (with the aid of a cellphone).

by Ruth Ellen Gruber

On an overcast afternoon not long ago, two friends and I found ourselves plodding to and fro amid a forest of crooked gravestones in the centuries-old Jewish cemetery in Bolekhiv, a small town in western Ukraine south of L'viv.We were on a sort of pilgrimage, methodically pushing through weeds and peering closely at eroding epitaphs, trying to find the tomb of a man we knew had been buried there more than 200 years earlier.Dov Ber Birkenthal, an intrepid wine merchant and Jewish community leader, had been born in Bolekhiv -- known in Polish as Bolechow -- in 1723 and died there in 1805.His tombstone, I knew, bore an epitaph that paid tribute to a long, busy and eventful life -- it summed him up as "the learned, the renowned leader, the open-handed, the aged."

Birkenthal, generally referred to as Ber of Bolechow, has been one of my heroes since I was introduced to him through his remarkable autobiography more than 15 years ago. Ber is believed to have written his memoirs in 1799 or 1800, five years or so before his death. He described everything from local political and religious intrigue to how he drove hard business deals and suffered on the road during arduous wine-buying journeys to Hungary. He wrote of customs duties, currency fraud, and drunken wagon drivers; of icy rivers, double-dealing business partners, flea-ridden inns, and occasional attacks by roving bandits. One long, dramatic passage describes how bandits attacked Bolechow itself in 1759, robbing and looting, killing several people, and setting homes on fire. Some local residents gave as good as they got -- the town's wealthiest Jew, a man called Nachman, held off the attackers with a blazing firearm in each fist. Business was Ber's primary concern. But he also touched on his failed first marriage and the love he found with his second wife, Leah; the pride he felt in his children; his friendships with other Jews and non-Jews; and his passion for books and prowess in half a dozen languages. Ber, "was a remarkable man," wrote Daniel Mendelsohn in his best-selling 2006 book The Lost: a Search for Six of the Six Million, which describes Mendelsohn's quest to learn the fate of his own relatives from Bolekhiv who were killed in the Holocaust. "Ber was the son of a forward-thinking, broad-minded wine merchant who encouraged his son's precocious intellectual appetites from his earliest childhood -- even allowing the boy to study Greek and Latin with the local Catholic priests, an unheard of thing," he wrote. The precocious boy, Mendelsohn went on, "grew up to be a precocious man: a successful wine merchant but also a scholar of enormous breadth and depth, a man who could read easily in Polish and German and Italian, as well as in Hebrew and Greek and Latin." He was, he concluded, "a man who exemplified the liberal, worldly energies that helped to create the Haskalah, the great Jewish Enlightenment movement." I had been to Bolekhiv once before, in 2006, when I was researching the latest edition of my book, National Geographic Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern Europe.

On that visit, too, I had prowled through the cemetery trying to find Ber's grave. "Dov" (in Hebrew) and "Ber" (in Yiddish) both mean "Bear," and I did indeed discover a tombstone of someone named Dov Ber that was decorated with a particularly vivid carving of a bear and bunches of grapes, indicating involvement of the deceased in the wine trade.

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RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- Jewish Heritage

Samorin synagogue, At H0me Gallery, 2009. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

My latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column is from the milestone Bratislava seminar on the care, conservation and maintenance of historic Jewish property.

March 26, 2009

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia (JTA) – The restitution of Jewish communal property in Central and Eastern Europe has been a hot-button issue since the Iron Curtain fell nearly 20 years ago.

But often forgotten amid the slow and painful legal battles to get back historic Jewish properties that were seized by the Nazis or nationalized by postwar Communist regimes is the practical and urgent need to care for, conserve and maintain the properties once they’ve been recovered.

For two decades and more, I've documented, written about and photographed these sites, which include many yeshivas and synagogues.

Many are huge. Many are dilapidated. Some are recognized as historic monuments. Most stand in towns where few, if any, Jews now live. Even basic maintenance can stretch already strapped communal resources.

In March, I joined Jewish community representatives from 15 countries who gathered to address these concerns at a seminar held in the Slovak capital, Bratislava.

The aim of the meeting was to foster networking and cross-border consultation and spark creative strategic thinking. Many participants had never met before and had little awareness of how colleagues in other countries were confronting similar challenges. Some knew little about the variety of Jewish heritage sites in other countries.

The meeting dealt with issues ranging from fundraising to roof repair to what Jewish law says about synagogue re-use.

During the seminar, which was organized by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the International Survey of Jewish Monuments and the Slovak Jewish Heritage Center, we visited several sites in the Bratislava area to see how some best-practice solutions had been implemented.

One was the former synagogue in Samorin, a small town southeast of Bratislava, built in 1912.

Back in the early 1990s, it was a derelict shell standing silent and empty on the outskirts of the shabby city center. Its lonely position and crumbling façade underscored its poignancy as a surviving relic of the devastated past.

Since then, it has undergone a dramatic transformation.

Owned by the Union of Slovak Jewish Communities, it is now held on a long-term lease by a couple who took over the building in 1995, restored it and transformed it into the At Home Gallery, a center for contemporary art.

The synagogue is used for cultural purposes aimed at the public at large. It even once hosted the Dalai Lama.

It also now forms part of a new tourism and educational trail called the Slovak Route of Jewish Heritage, which links about 20 historic Jewish sites around the country.

In restoring the building, Csaba Kiss and his Canadian-born wife, Suzanne, deliberately chose to retain evidence that the interior had been desecrated. The walls still bear painted decoration, but the paintings are faded and patchy; they have not been retouched or prettied up.

"Our idea was not to touch the walls," Kiss once told me. "They have memories; we can see them. It's special."

At the seminar's conclusion, participants agreed on a set of pragmatic guidelines with best-practice principles and procedures for the Jewish properties.

Jewish heritage, the guidelines state, "is the legacy of all aspects of Jewish history – religious and secular." At the same time, "Jewish history and art are part of every nation’s history and art. Jewish heritage is part of national heritage, too."

These assertions may appear to state the obvious, but given contentious internal Jewish politics and the taboos and prejudice that historically applied to Jewish culture in Europe, they actually articulate crucial basic concepts. And the guidelines as a whole, while non-binding, represent a milestone when it comes to restituted Jewish properties.

Addressing a frequently heard criticism of Jewish communal management style, the guidelines state, "Honesty and transparency are Jewish values and should be especially apparent in the handling of all matters concerning Jewish property." The guidelines urge detailed documentation of Jewish communal properties and heritage sites and underscore the need for openness and collaboration among Jewish and non-Jewish institutions.

Will these guidelines be followed? Probably not to the letter. Financial considerations, legal obstacles, local conditions and human nature, among other things, prevent adherence to ideals.

Still, they form a framework that can influence practice and, perhaps, finally bring these sites the maintenance and preservation they – and the Jewish people – need.