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.

My new column -- in Italian

Monument to the Holocaust, Buehl. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

I've started writing a brief commentary/column for the web site of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities -- moked.it.

The editor asked me to "read" or "read into" one of my photographs -- or another image -- each week.

I started with a picture I took last month in Buehl, Germany (when I was there for a conference on Bluegrass Music) of the monument marking the spot where the synagogue stood before it was destroyed on Kristallnacht. Today, an Italian ice cream parlor stands there. I used the picture as a peg to discuss (very briefly) German commemoration of the Shoah.

Nel cuore di Buehl, una piccola città tedesca non lontano da Baden-Baden, si gusta gelato italiano sul posto dove per più di 110 anni sorgeva la sinagoga. Fra i tavolini davanti al "Eis-cafe Italia", così come in tante altre città e cittadine tedesche, un monumento molto semplice fa parte ormai dell'arredo urbano, che segna e forma il tessuto vivente del luogo. Memoria quotidiana, dunque. Memoria di oggigiorno (come i monumenti ai caduti di guerra che sono disseminati in ogni cittadina italiana). Per i curiosi, per chi si ferma a leggere, il monumento informa che fino al 10 novembre 1938, la famigerata Notte dei Cristalli, si trovava lì una sinagoga costruita in 1823. Sul suo sito web, lo Yad Vashem ha un filmato che mostra la sua distruzione. Il filmato fu girato da un pompiere, un vigile del fuoco, un amatore che girava i film per hobby. Secondo lo Yad Vashem, voleva "catturare il lavoro dei suoi collegi", mostrali mentre controllavano il fuoco in modo che distruggesse soltanto la sinagoga e non gli altri palazzi intorno. Un anno fa, parlando i occasione del Giorno della Memoria in Germania, l'ex ambasciatore di Israele Avi Primor si è posto una domanda: "Dove nel mondo si è mai vista una nazione che costruisce monumenti alla sua propria vergogna?".