Ruthless Cosmopolitan

I Receive a High Honor from Poland

2011-09-23T01:38:00.000-07:00

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

I'm honored and delighted to report that at a ceremony at the Polish Consulate in New York last night I received the Knight's Cross of the Order of Merit -- one of Poland's highest honors awarded to foreigners. Poland's President Komorowski presented the awards -- alas, I was not able to be in New York, but my friend who stood in for me took a video of the moment when my name was read out:

Given my history with Poland, going back more than 30 years, it is quite an honor! As my old friend and colleague Doug Stanglin reported in USA Today, this award comes 28 years after Poland's the-Communist regime arrested me, threw me in jail, interrogated me and expelled me on trumpted up "espionage" charges.

At Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, 1983

What a difference a few years and the fall of the Berlin Wall makes.

In 1983, at the height of martial law and the Solidarity worker's movement, Poland's communist-led government detained American reporter Ruth Ellen Gruber on suspicions of "crimes against the state."

The then-bureau chief for United Press International was hauled in for questioning by police, then expelled from the country.

Thursday, the Polish government was at it again, with a new proclamation aimed at Gruber.

This time, it bestowed on her the Knight's Cross of the Order of Merit, one of the highest honors awarded to foreigners.

.Read full story HERE

Ruthless Cosmopolitan -- In Summer, Jewish studies programs flourish

2011-08-21T04:19:00.000-07:00

My Ruthless Cosmopolitan column, originally published in JTA on August 1, 2011

Visitors to the Auschwitz Museum Memorial in Oswiecim, Poland, enter the Arbeit Macht Frei gate on a rainy day. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

KRAKOW, Poland (JTA) -- In Austria and Poland recently, I couldn't seem to get away from students, scholars and just plain interested folks who were taking or teaching summer programs in Jewish studies.

I myself spoke at a three-day "summer academy" in Vienna where more than 100 members of the general public turned up for lectures by international experts on Eastern European Jewish history.

In both Vienna and Krakow, I met informally with some of the 71 teachers from Jewish and public schools in North America and Israel attending a nine-day summer academy of lectures, travel and workshops organized by the Vienna-based Central Europe Center for Research and Documentation.

The programs reflected the remarkable resurgence of both Jewish informal learning and academic studies that has taken place in Europe since the fall of communism. This process has opened up opportunities and fields of scholarship to new generations of students and researchers. It also has gone some way toward repairing the damage wrought by the Holocaust.

About 750 institutions of European Jewish learning were "lost forever" in the war, according to the European Association of Jewish Studies, with many cities experiencing a "near total devastation of their Jewish studies resources." In postwar communist Europe, teaching and research in Jewish and Holocaust studies was virtually taboo.

The pace of reconstruction has varied from country to country. But today the European Association of Jewish Studies lists nearly 450 academic institutions and universities in two dozen European countries where Jewish studies courses or classes are taught. Many other programs are associated with non-academic bodies.

Summer programs have a special place in this scheme, as they often are geared specifically to visiting foreign participants. Some of them, such as the 5-year-old Leo Baeck Summer University at Humboldt Unviersity in Berlin, are organized in partnership with North American or Israeli institutions.

The benefits of study abroad programs are well known: exposure to other cultures and languages, contact with new ideas, the opportunity to forge international connections.

Looking back, my own days on a university study abroad program in Europe set the course of my life. I spent the first semester of my senior year studying art and art history on an American university program in Rome. I returned to the States to complete my degree and graduate, but within a few months I had moved back to Europe. I have lived here ever since.

So it was revealing to meet people who had chosen to spend part of their vacations this summer delving into Jewish history or Holocaust studies -- and to hear about the often-unexpected impact of such on-site experience. That was the case especially in Poland, the prewar Jewish heartland that turned into the main Nazi killing ground.

"These are seriously motivated people," Annamaria Orla-Bukowska, a professor at Krakow's Jagiellonian University, told me about the more than 20 students from the United States, Latin America, Israel and elsewhere who had enrolled in the first international Summer Academy organized by the memorial museum at the former Auschwitz death camp.

Held in July, it focused on Auschwitz and the Holocaust as well as on postwar history, Polish-German relations during the war and the educational challenges facing the Auschwitz Museum.

"You can imagine that it is physically and geographically and psychologically not easy to decide to take courses that will not only take up weekends and holiday time, but will actually be held at Auschwitz," said Orla-Bukowska, who has taught Jewish and Holocaust courses in several summer programs in Poland.

Hailey Dilman, a Jewish studies graduate student at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, was one of 10 U.S. and Canadian students who took part in the annual fellows program for graduate students offered by the Auschwitz Jewish Center. The center is an independent institution affiliated with the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York and is located in Oswiecim, the town where the Auschwitz camp is sited.

The three-week fellowship combined travel to Holocaust and Jewish heritage sites with courses and archival work on Polish Jewish history and contemporary Jewish life.

Though much of the focus of her graduate and undergraduate work had been on the Holocaust, Dilman had never visited Poland or the Nazi death camps. She said that studying the impact of the Holocaust where it actually took place had been a revelation.

"It was amazing for me to learn that even though the Jews basically disappeared from Poland, they left such a strong imprint on Polish society that is still felt today," said Dilman, who is from Toronto. "Before the trip, I theoretically knew this was so, but I had to experience it to actually learn of it."

Elizabeth Bryant, a doctoral candidate at Florida State University, also was an Auschwitz Jewish Center fellow. Her master's degree had focused on Auschwitz -- but like Dilman, she had never visited the camp.

"Trips like this serve as a reminder that life is not always in black and white -- something that is sometimes difficult to remember when studying the Holocaust," she said. "The complexities of Polish culture serve to eradicate the notion that Poland can only be defined by its past, whether through communism or World War II."

Bryant called her fellowship experience "life changing."

"I do not say this lightly," she told me. "This program impacted me more deeply than I ever could have imagined."

And that, indeed, may have been the point.

Forward -- Barbara Kirshenblatt Gimblett interview

2011-08-20T06:27:00.000-07:00

This was originally published in The Forward on August 12, 2011

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has many titles: award-winning author, essayist and University Professor at NYU, among them. Most recently, she’s been tapped to lead the core exhibition development team for the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which is now being built on the site of the Warsaw Ghetto, and which recently made headlines with the surprise departure of its longtime director.

Photo: Marek Los

Long associated with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett worked with Polish-born scholar Lucjan Dobroszycki on the landmark 1976 exhibition “Image Before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life Before the Holocaust,” which later was made into a book and a film. Her latest book, “They Called Me Mayer July” (University of California Press, 2007), was a collaboration with her father, Mayer Kirshenblatt, who died in 2009 at the age of 93. It combined Kirshenblatt’s paintings depicting prewar life in his hometown of Opatow, Poland, with stories gleaned from interviews that his daughter began conducting with him in the 1960s.

Forward contributor Ruth Ellen Gruber caught up with Kirshenblatt-Gimblett in Krakow during the Festival of Jewish Culture and asked her about her Yiddish roots, her most enduring project and the current morale at the museum.

RUTH ELLEN GRUBER: You grew up speaking Yiddish in a Jewish immigrant neighborhood in Toronto and have been working on Polish-Jewish and Yiddish studies since the 1960s. What got you started?

BARBARA KIRSHENBLATT-GIMBLETT: I had always taken for granted that I knew Yiddish. But there was a “eureka” moment when one of my graduate professors at Indiana University encouraged me to do some field research in Yiddish culture.

So I went home to Toronto and discovered in my family and community an entire world of Yiddish. I contacted the Yiddish linguist Mikhl Herzog… and he sent me airfare and told me to come to New York immediately.

The trip was a real rite of passage. Mikhl brought me to YIVO; he took me down to the archive, to a vault. Within were Sholom Aleichem sound recordings and other treasures. Then he took me to the home of [linguist] Max Weinreich, who was then old and blind — it was not long before he died — and Regina, his wife. It was like an audience with the king of Yiddish. I met all these incredible people at YIVO….

What I had discovered in my family and my hometown was a world of people with Yiddish culture in their bones. But at YIVO I discovered intellectuals and scholarship in Yiddish, and a commitment to studying Yiddish and Yiddish culture.

“Image Before My Eyes” brought pre-Holocaust Polish-Jewish history to public attention in visual form. What did it mean to work on this project?

Working with [Dobroszycki] was an incredible experience. I really felt like I sat at his feet, and I regard our collaboration as absolutely another turning point for me. I had a long-standing interest in photography, and I went through that entire 15,000-photo collection four times, as we made a selection for the exhibition and book…. That meant that for the first time in my life I had 15,000 images of Jewish life in Poland from 1864 to 1939 in my head. I now had an image bank of the first order. And because I brought a critical approach to thinking about photography, I was interested in what these photographs were — not as windows through which you would look at a life and a world, but as cultural artifacts in their own right.

You’ve worked on projects dealing with museums, performance, Yiddish, food, exhibition and the arts in general. But your most personal and enduring was your more than 40-year collaboration with your father.

I had begun interviewing my father without any specific goal or outcome. and I recorded all our interviews. At first he was helping me. Gradually, he himself became interested, and what began as my project started to become his project.… Interviewing my father became probably the single most meaningful experience of my life. I consider it a blessing to have had the opportunity to spend over 40 years in a conversation with a person with a prodigious memory who had lived through the interwar years but did not directly experience the Holocaust. Although he lost most of his family, his memories were not filtered through that trauma.

Why did you take on the position to lead the core exhibition development team of the Warsaw museum?

I think it is an incredibly important project, and I wanted to bring everything I’ve ever learned to bear on it. I felt as if nothing I’d ever done or learned would be wasted.

The museum has gone through some rough patches in recent months, with the departure, under pressure, of its director, Jerzy Halbersztadt, and financial shortfalls. What can you say about the status of the institution?

First of all, one of the great strengths of the institution is that it does not depend on one person. And that is a tribute to the former director. This museum has the good fortune to have a very, very good team. And the team has rallied and is functioning in a very positive way. So I’m optimistic….

Financially, we struggle. But we have donors, led by Sigmund Rolat and Tad Taube, that have been with us and supported us for many years.

What have been the main challenges? Are you satisfied with the process and result so far?

Although I first started coming to Poland in 1981, it was not until I began working on this project that I began to realize what it means to tell the story of how Polish Jews lived — and not only how they died — here, in the very place where they created such a vibrant civilization. That story has been overshadowed, understandably, by the Holocaust.… What began as a challenge — there is no collection of objects that could support such a compelling story — turned out to be an extraordinary opportunity and lesson, so to speak, in how to bring history to life using every possible medium.

How close is the exhibition to being installed?

Our goal is to open April 2013. When he visited the museum in May, President Obama promised to bring his daughters to the opening — and we’ll hold him to it!

Read more: http://forward.com/articles/140908/#ixzz1VZimbPFR

Forward -- Krakow's Jewish Cafes

2011-08-20T06:18:00.000-07:00

This was originally published on July 14, 2011 in the "Jew and the Carrot" blog of The Forward.

Steve Weintraub reacts to the decor of the Ariel

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Krakow’s old Jewish quarter, Kazimierz, is famous (or notorious, depending on how you look at it) for its Jewish-themed tourist infrastructure. Its “Jewish” cafes present a nostalgic literary image of prewar Jewish life — some with taste and sensitivity, others in a disturbingly kitschy manner.

At least a dozen (and maybe more) cafes, restaurants, hotels and other establishments, which are mainly geared toward tourists, make reference to Kazimierz’s Jewish character. In general, furnishings and decor evoke a certain Old World shtetl chic with dark wood, old books, candlesticks, lace doilies, mismatched old furniture, and old (or faux-old) paintings of genre scenes and portraits of rabbis. They spell “Jewish” locally in the same way that dragons and red lanterns spell “Chinese” and that checkered table cloths with Chianti flasks signified “Italian” culture.

These venues use Jewish themes or make reference to Kazimierz’s prewar Jewish history in their name or signs, which are sometimes written in Hebrew-style letters. Their menus feature items like gefilte fish, chicken soup, stuffed goose neck and kreplach, as well as dishes described as “Jewish-style,” or with names such as “Rabbi’s Salad,” “Yankiel the Innkeeper of Berdytchov’s Soup” or “Maurycy the Tailor’s Slices of Beef.”

The trend started nearly 20 years ago, with the beginning of the touristic development of Kazimierz. The area encompasses Central Europe’s most important — and intact — complex of Jewish heritage sites, but at the time it was a rundown slum, and the first Jewish-style cafes were welcomed oases. They were often conceived as an homage to the vanished past. Since then, the district has evolved into one of Europe’s premier Jewish tourist attractions, home to the huge annual Festival of Jewish Culture, several Jewish institutions and even an active Jewish community center. An upscale kosher restaurant, The Olive Tree, opened in the area recently, serving sleek (and quite tasty) kosher dining, with an emphasis on Mediterranean cuisine.

Nowadays, visitors are still sometimes shocked by the extent of the kitsch (Szeroka Street, the main square in Jewish Kazimierz and the hub of Jewish tourism, souvenir stalls and Jewish-themed venues, is sometimes referred to as “Jewrassic Park”). But the Jewish-themed cafes are actually now in the minority — Kazimierz has become a major district of youth-oriented nightlife and music, with scores of pubs, clubs and cafes, and eateries of all sorts.

This year, during the festival, I enlisted two festival participants — Chicago-based dancer Steve Weintraub and Berlin-based trumpeter Paul Brody — to join me on a couple of “café crawls” to rate half a dozen of the most prominent Jewish-themed establishments in the district, from the ones that are over the top, to the ones that are a nice place to hang out.

Klezmer Hois

A meeting place for local and visiting Jewish intellectuals and artists, K-H is run by Wojtek and Malgosia Ornat, who also operate a Jewish publishing house and bookstore. Both have Jewish roots. The Ornats’ first Jewish themed café, opened in 1992, was the first in Kazimierz, and their take on style, décor and menu has influenced many other cafes in the district and in other cities. Its front room is an intimate cafe/restaurant, but it also has larger dining rooms. Up flights of creaky stairs is a hotel with old-fashioned furnishings. In the shady garden, you can enjoy one of the best breakfasts in town — home-baked rolls, sour cherry jam, cheeses, fruit, eggs and hummus. Szeroka 6

Once Upon A Time In Kazimierz

The highly theatrical concept has always caused me to cringe a bit. The exterior of the café/restaurant is mocked up to look like a row of pre-war shops, with weathered-looking shop signs fronting the street like Benjamin Holcer’s Carpentry Shop and Chajim Cohen’s General Store. Big signs explain that the restaurant “takes us down memory lane to that bygone time.” The interior resembles an overstocked antique or curio shop crowded with items relating to the false-front shops, but it is surprisingly pleasant, achieving a sort of warm, fuzzy coziness. The menu is small but the duck with cherries comes recommended. Szeroka 1

Noah’s Ark (Arka Noego)

Noah’s Ark, one of the best known Jewish cafés, opened in 1995 and was long located in a historic building with vaulted ceilings on Szeroka. It recently moved and it may be unfair to judge it yet on its new incarnation — the lace tablecloths and candlesticks are in place, live klezmer bands play at night and the restaurant is full — but everything is still so new that it’s rather soulless. Its menu still offers dishes with names like “Cheese Soup of Jealous Sarah” and “Veal in Garlic Sauce for the Klezmers.” Corner of Izaaka and Kupa streets

Cheder

This pleasant little café is an offshoot of the Festival of Jewish Culture. It has a low-key atmosphere, a library of Jewish books, and it serves exotic teas and coffees, kosher wine, and Israeli snacks such as pita, cheeses, olives and sun-dried tomatoes. Cheder aims to serve as an informal Jewish cultural center and hosts book presentations, readings, concerts and other events often keyed to contemporary Jewish culture. Jozefa 36

Sara

Sara used to be a forbiddingly stark, modern café in the Jewish Culture Center located in a renovated prayer house at the edge of Plac Nowy. It has undergone redecoration to make it much more cozy, but it still eschews nostalgic kitsch. Its roof garden has a terrific view of Plac Nowy and Kazimierz rooftops, in what may be the most secluded and secret spot in the district. At the center for Jewish culture, Meisels 17

Ariel

Ariel was the first Jewish-style venue to open — back in 1992 when it was run by Wojtek and Malgosia Ornat (now the owners of Klezmer Hois). Today, it is the most blatantly commercial of them all. It is a rambling establishment, catering to groups. Its facade sports a huge menorah flanked by lions and dominates Szeroka. While the outdoor seating is pleasant enough, the dozens of paintings of rabbis and other Jewish imagery that decorate its interior strike me as prime examples off-the-shelf “Jewish.” Its little shop selling carved figurines of Jews and even refrigerator magnets of Jewish heads with stereotype profiles makes me particularly uncomfortable. There’s a large menu, but the rugelach we ordered were too stale to eat. Szeroka 18

Read more: http://blogs.forward.com/the-jew-and-the-carrot/139814/#ixzz1VZgrzLiH

Arty Semite Blog: Traveling the Czechgrass Trail

2011-07-26T11:44:00.000-07:00

This post appeared originally in the Arty Semite blog of the Jewish Daily Forward, July 25, 2011

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Photo Courtesy of Druha Trava

I’ve just spent two days in a Prague studio helping record the vocal tracks for a new CD by the Czech country/bluegrass/fusion group Druha Trava. Founded 20 years ago, DT has brought out more than a dozen albums, including several in English. The new CD is the first that will primarily feature English-language versions of singer-songwriter Robert Krestan’s distinctive original songs. I made the translations, and the studio session was the culmination of a collaborative project that had taken more than five years to come to fruition.

Most people know me for my writing and other work on Jewish issues, but for much of the past decade I’ve also been exploring Europe’s “imaginary Wild West,” spending time at Wild West theme parks, swinging door saloons, and American-style country music events.

I first heard Druha Trava — the name means “Second Grass” — back in 2004, when I was bouncing around the Czech Republic, following the summer bluegrass festival circuit. I don’t speak Czech, but the group has been my favorite band ever since.

The flourishing Czech bluegrass scene dates back decades and has its roots in the so-called Tramp Movement, a Czech outdoors and music subculture that originated after World War I and embraced American-style campfire singing and the romance of the West.

But Druha Trava uses American roots music as just a starting point for its own synthesis of bluegrass, rock, country music, folk and even classical motifs. American banjo great Tony Trischka, who has toured with DT, was one of the first to call the sound “Czechgrass.”

All the musicians are virtuosos. But it’s Krestan’s songs and raw, gritty vocals that make DT’s music particularly compelling. American reviewer David Royko once said his voice embodied the “power and beauty of a thick slice of unvarnished oak.”

Krestan is an iconic performance figure, famous among Czech fans for his poetic and often enigmatic lyrics. He has also rendered many English songs into Czech — DTs’s 2007 CD “Dylanovky” features Czech versions of Bob Dylan songs. Aside from music he is the Czech translator of books by Norman Mailer and other American writers.

I started translating Krestan’s songs into English in 2006. My first goal was basic: I loved the Czech originals, but I wanted to know what they meant. As I started working, though, it seemed much more logical — and in fact, even easier — to put them in a rhyming form that could be sung. The process was surprisingly straightforward.

A young student in Prague, David Kraus, supplied me with word-for-word equivalents. David’s father Tomas is an old friend, the secretary of the Federation of Czech Jewish Communities, but he also knows a lot about the Czech country music scene. In Communist times Tomas’s late brother produced, wrote and translated songs for several key Czech tramp and country-style groups.

I took the words that David gave me, compared them to the rhythm of the original Czech lyrics, and listened over and over to the original songs in order to capture their meaning and rhyme structure as well as to fit them to the melodies.

Czech is a more bristly language than English, with quite different sounds and cadences, and Krestan uses words for their tonality as well as meaning. But remarkably, my lyrics got to a point where they seemed to click into place. Later, Krestan and I spent a couple of sessions together tweaking the English to improve both nuance and “singability.”

In the studio, as Krestan sang into the microphone, I stood in the sound booth with DT’s banjo player Lubos Malina, who is co-producing the CD with Nashville-based Steve Walsh. Five years on, it was the first time I heard the songs sung in their final form. (Walsh oversaw the recording of the instrumentals in Nashville last spring.) They sounded, well, right. I focused on recording levels and intonation, but I couldn’t keep a goofy smile off my face. If all goes as planned the CD, called “Shuttle to Bethlehem” will be out in September. Druha Trava begins a tour of the US on October 13 in Park Rapids, Minnesota.

Read more: http://blogs.forward.com/the-arty-semite/140290/#ixzz1TEpoPmAv

Oswiecim, the city of Auschwitz, wrestles with whether the past must be part of its future

2011-07-25T14:52:00.000-07:00

Woman walks her baby in front of the Auschwitz Jewish Center. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

JTA, July 21, 2011

OSWIECIM, Poland (JTA) -- Can a town that exists in the shadow of death transform itself into a place of normalcy?

The question long has vexed Oswiecim, the town of 40,000 in southern Poland where the notorious Auschwitz death camp is located.

For decades, residents and city leaders have struggled to separate Oswiecim from Auschwitz and pull the town, its history and its cultural associations out from under the overwhelming black cloud of the death camp, which is now a memorial museum.

With only limited success to date, however, a new generation of town leaders is trying a different tack: bolstering Oswiecim as a vital local community, but also reaching out to connect with Auschwitz rather than disassociate from it.

"Ten or 15 years ago, many of us began thinking that the way to go was not to reject Auschwitz but to deal with it," said historian Artur Szyndler, 40, the director of research and education at the Auschwitz Jewish Center who grew up in Oswiecim under communism.

The town has adopted "City of Peace" as its official slogan. And for years a Catholic-run Dialogue and Prayer Center and a German-run International Youth Center near the camp have promoted reflection and reconciliation.

Downtown, the 10-year-old Auschwitz Jewish Center makes clear that before the Holocaust, Oswiecim had a majority Jewish population and was known widely by its Yiddish name, Oshpitzin. The center includes a Jewish museum and a functioning refurbished synagogue -- the only one in the city to survive. It runs study programs and serves as a meeting place for visiting groups.

And now the Oswiecim Life Festival, founded last year by Darek Maciborek, a nationally known radio DJ who was born and lives in Oswiecim, aims to use music and youth culture to fight anti-Semitism and racism.

"This place seems to be perfectly fitting for initiatives with a message of peace," Maciborek said. "A strong voice from this place is crucial."

The closing concert of this year's festival, held in June, included the Chasidic reggae star Matisyahu. He gave a midnight performance for a crowd of 10,000 in a rainswept stadium just a couple of miles from the notorious "Arbeit Macht Frei" ("work sets you free") gate of the death camp.

"It was an incredibly symbolic moment," Oswiecim City Council President Piotr Hertig told JTA. "It was a very important symbol that a religious Jew was performing at a festival in such a place."

Hertig said the new push to bolster Oswiecim and reach out more to the Auschwitz museum and its visitors is partly due to a generational shift in the town.

For a long time, most of Oswiecim's population consisted of thousands of newcomers from elsewhere in Poland who settled here after World War II. But today's community leaders increasingly include 30- and 40-somethings like Hertig and Maciberok who were born in Oswiecim and feel rooted here.

The town now has plans to go ahead with several projects that had been thwarted by outgoing Mayor Janusz Marszalek, who had particularly strained relations with the Auschwitz Memorial, according to Hertig. These include a new visitors' center for the memorial and a park on the riverbank just opposite Auschwitz that will be connected to the camp memorial by a foot bridge.

"This will be a very good place for people to come after visiting Auschwitz and Birkenau, where they can meditate, reflect and soothe their negative emotions," Hertig said.

Hertig said he hoped new programs and study visits developed with the Auschwitz memorial will encourage longer stays by visitors. Plans are in the works to build an upscale hotel in town and refurbish the main market square and other infrastructure.

"Auschwitz, on our outskirts, is the symbol of the greatest evil," Hertig said. "But at the same time we want to show to others that Oswiecim is a town with an 800-year history that wants to be a normal living town."

Located on the opposite side of the Sola River from the Auschwitz camp, Oswiecim has an old town center with a pleasant market square, several imposing churches, and a medieval castle and tower. In the modern part of town is a new shopping mall and state-of-the-art public library, as well as a big civic culture center that hosts a variety of events, including an annual Miss Oswiecim beauty pageant.

But few of the more than 1.2 million people who visit the Auschwitz camp each year ever set foot in Oswiecim or even know that the town exists.

"It is difficult to comprehend what it must be like to call this city your hometown," said Jody Manning, a doctoral student at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., who is writing a dissertation on life in Oswiecim and Dachau, Germany, also the site of a concentration camp.

Local residents long have resented that most outsiders make no distinction between their town and the death camp.

"People from outside are sometimes shocked. They ask how I can live in Auschwitz. But I don't -- I live in Oswiecim," said Gosia, a 30-year-old woman who works at the Catholic Dialogue Center. "This is Oswiecim, my hometown -- not Auschwitz!"

It remains to be seen whether the new push can help remove the stigma from Oswiecim and achieve a less strained modus vivendi with the death camp memorial. "People have the right to live normally, but I don't think they'll be able to disassociate from Auschwitz," said Stanislaw Krajewski, a leading Polish Jewish intellectual. "The best they can do is to use it in a constructive way; the very name Auschwitz has a magical power."

Poland -- My nytimes.com article on the Gwozdziec synagogue project

2011-06-16T05:45:00.000-07:00

On site in Sanok. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

A 300-Year-Old Synagogue Comes Back to Life in Poland

By RUTH ELLEN GRUBER

Published: June 15, 2011

SANOK, POLAND — In the far southeast corner of Poland, the warm summer air is resounding with the rasp of old-fashioned iron saws and the satisfying twack-twack-twack of ax blades on wood.

Here, in the foothills of the Carpathians, an international crew of master timber craftsmen and students has been working on an intensely hands-on project that combines history, art and education. They are building a replica of the tall peaked roof and inner cupola of an ornate wooden synagogue that stood for 300 years in the town of Gwozdziec, now in Ukraine.

The replica, which will be 85 percent of the original size of the building, will be installed as one of the key components of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, currently under construction in Warsaw and scheduled to open in 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.

Constructing the replica is a joint project of the museum in Warsaw and the Handshouse Studio, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit organization that emphasizes learning by building, particularly the reconstruction of historical structures and other objects.

“There are certain things you can learn by making it that you can’t learn any other way,” said Rick Brown, who founded and directs Handshouse with his wife, Laura. “Every time you pick up a tool or start a process or use a certain material, embedded in that is a very rich, almost unlimited learning experience.”

The Browns conducted years of research on Eastern Europe’s lost wooden synagogues before embarking on construction of the Gwozdziec replica in Sanok in May. They studied prewar photographs, drawings and other documentation, built models and made on-site investigations of wooden churches and other buildings still found in Poland and Ukraine.

While wooden synagogues were destroyed, many towns and villages in this corner of Poland, and also across the border in Slovakia and Ukraine, still boast fine examples of wooden folk architecture. Dozens of evocative wooden churches dating back centuries are clearly signposted, both in Poland and Slovakia, as part of a “wooden architecture trail.”

There are also several impressive masonry synagogues within an easy drive of Sanok. The 18th-century synagogue in Lancut, now a museum, has beautifully restored interior painting and other decoration. One in Rymanow stood for decades as a ruin but has been partially rebuilt, with a tall peaked roof now protecting the vigorous but sadly fading frescoes of Biblical animals and Jerusalem that grace its walls.

In Lesko, the 17th-century synagogue was rebuilt in the 1960s and today houses a gallery of local arts and crafts. Lesko’s vast Jewish cemetery, just a short walk away, is one of the oldest in Poland, with massive tombstones dating to the 16th century.

“The Gwozdziec wooden synagogue represents the relationship between Polish vernacular architecture and Jewish liturgical architecture in one unit,” Mr. Brown explained. “They literally come together into one, very powerful, cultural statement.”

For the Gwozdziec project, an international team of nearly 30 master craftsmen from the Timber Framers Guild are being joined by groups of students from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where the Browns teach.

Timber framers came from the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, Belgium and Japan to lend their skills, all on a volunteer basis.

All the work is being carried out using techniques and tools that the builders of the original synagogue would have used: axes, saws, mallets and other hand-held implements. The aim is to gain an understanding of just what went into the building of the synagogue and how its construction would have been envisaged and carried out — and also to lend authenticity to the replica.

“It brings back the lost story of the synagogue, the town, this culture,” said Patrick Goguen, a student at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

The project is occurring in several stages. Building the timber-framed roof and cupola is the first stage, running through June. Students and artists will hold workshops this summer and next summer to reproduce the intricate polychrome painting that adorned the ceiling of the cupola. These workshops will be held in eight Polish towns in masonry synagogues that still stand.

The timber framing is taking place in a corner of Sanok’s Ethnographic Park, a sprawling open-air folk-architecture museum that displays wooden buildings — houses, barns, churches, chapels and even beehives — that have been transferred from a number of villages in the region.

Here, thick logs are being hewn by hand into flat-sided timbers — a process that can take two days per log — and then manually sawed into thinner pieces. The components are then shaped and joined without nails.

“We’re of the cult of woodworkers; our texts are the texts of geometry and are expressed in the iconography of all the religions of the world,” said Jackson DuBois, from Bellingham, Washington. “To us, this piece of Jewish culture is about hewing logs. That’s why we’re using tools of the day.”

See the story on the web site by clicking HERE

Ruthless Cosmopolitan -- Never Better in Krakow?

2011-06-16T05:36:00.000-07:00

Visitors in the Izaak synagogue. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

My latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column, on the revival of Jewish spirit in Krakow. I also posted about the Night of the Synagogues on my Jewish Heritage blog -- with lots more pictures.

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

June 15, 2011

KRAKOW, Poland (JTA) -- Jews in Krakow have a new slogan -- "Never Better."

The catchphrase is deliberately provocative, a blatant rejoinder to "Never Again," the slogan long associated with Holocaust memory and the fight against anti-Semitic prejudice.

It may be counterintuitive, acknowledges Jonathan Ornstein, the American-born director of Krakow's Jewish community center who helped come up with the slogan.

But it's aimed at rebranding Jewish Poland, or at least Jewish Krakow, shaking up conventional perceptions and radically shifting the focus of how the Jewish experience here is viewed.

"Because the Holocaust isn't subtle, then the rebranding, as a way to get people to understand the situation here now, also can't be subtle," Ornstein explained.

Only a few hundred Jews live in Krakow, but the community has been rebuilding in the past two decades, particularly since the JCC opened three years ago.

"When we say 'Never Better,' it's not in terms of numbers, or the amount of things in Jewish life, or the synagogues that are functioning and all that," Ornstein said.

However, he went on, "in terms of the way the Jewish community interacts with the non-Jewish community and the direction that things are going, I think that there's never been a more optimistic time to be Jewish in Krakow than there is now."

I spoke with Ornstein on a Sunday in June, the morning after an unprecedented event that in a way had been a public affirmation of the new Jewish spirit he described.

Organized by the JCC, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the Krakow Jewish communal organization, it was called 7@Night -- Seven at Night or the Night of the Synagogues.

Night of the Living synagogues may have been a better description.

From 10:30 p.m. until 2 a.m., all seven of the historic synagogues in Krakow's old Jewish quarter, Kazimierz, were open to the public.

It was part festival, part celebration and part didactic exercise. The aim was to foster Jewish pride, but also to educate non-Jewish Poles about contemporary Jewish life and culture.

An astonishing 5,000 or more people turned out, a constant flow of people that trooped from one synagogue to the next and patiently braved long, slow lines and bottlenecks at doorways. Almost all were young Cracovians.

Each synagogue hosted an exhibit, concert, talk or other activity that was produced by Jews and highlighted Jewish life and culture as lived today in Poland, Israel and elsewhere.

Events ranged from talks by Krakow Rabbi Boaz Pash on "the ABCs of Judaism" to a live concert by an Israeli rock band to a DJ sampling new Jewish music from a console set up on the bimah of the gothic Old Synagogue, now a Jewish museum, to a panel discussion about the role of women in Judaism.

All the events were free -- and all were full.

"It far, far exceeded our expectations," said Ornstein.

I've never seen anything quite like it, even though I've followed the development of Kazimierz for more than 20 years -- from the time when it was an empty, rundown slum to its position now as one of the liveliest spots in the city.

I've witnessed -- and chronicled -- the development of Jewish-themed tourism, retail, entertainment and educational infrastructure in Krakow, including the Jewish Culture Festival that draws thousands of people each summer. And I've written extensively about the interest of non-Jews in Jewish culture.

But Seven at Night was something different. For one thing, nostalgia seemed to play no role. And also, unlike many of the Jewish events and attractions in Kazimierz, this one was organized and promoted by Jews themselves.

It was their show, kicking off with a public Havdalah ceremony celebrated by Rabbi Pash that saw hundreds of people singing and dancing in the JCC courtyard.

"Never Better" was a prominent theme.

Most explicitly, it was the title of a multimedia presentation that ran throughout the night, projected on the vaulted ceiling of the 16th century High Synagogue, which today is used as an exhibition hall. The presentation featured interviews with local Jews young and old, religious and secular, all expressing a confidence in their identity and future.

It's still anybody's guess whether or not demographic realities will enable the long-term survival of a Jewish community in Krakow. But Ornstein said that may not be the point.

A key message of the current activism, he said, was to help frame the context of Polish Jewish history and hammer home that however small their numbers, Jews in Poland are not a separate, exotic entity but part and parcel of 21st century Polish society.

"The powerful message is that Judaism isn't just an idea, it's not just something that belongs to the Polish past, but there are Jews living here," Ornstein said. "We're trying to say that you can be a Jewish Pole, not just a Jew in Poland, to turn 'Jew' into an adjective instead of a noun."

I hope he's right.

Ruthless Cosmopolitian -- At a Jewish time of reflection, thoughts on a Pope and Catholicism

2011-05-20T11:40:00.000-07:00

My latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column for JTA was a reflection on Catholic-Jewish relations in the wake of Pope John Paul II's beatification. Things have changed, even since I was a kid.....

By Ruth Ellen Gruber, May 9, 2011

ROME (JTA) -- Passover is over and Shavuot is weeks away. It's a season when Jews traditionally take time for contemplation and reflection.

This year, I've been reflecting on Catholicism. Rather on the complicated interfaith nexuses between Catholics and Jews.

In large part, of course, this is because of the beatification May 1 of Pope John Paul II.

Critics have questioned the decision by Pope Benedict XVI to waive the usual five-year waiting period and fast-track John Paul's road to sainthood.

And JP2 had his faults -- his handling of the priest sex abuse scandals has come under particular recent scrutiny.

But the Polish-born pontiff was the best pope the Jewish world ever had.

"There have been few times in the 2,000 years of Christian Jewish relations when Jews have shed genuine tears at the death of a Pope," the eminent Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum wrote in a recent column. "When Pope John Paul II died, I -- and many other Jews -- cried."

I don't recall actually shedding tears when John Paul died on April 2, 2005 at the age of 84. In fact, I was in the midst of celebrating my nephew's bar mitzvah.

But I did feel deeply touched by his passing -- I had reported on John Paul during most of his nearly 27-year papacy.

In a deliberate and demonstrative way, he had made bettering Catholic-Jewish relations and confronting the Holocaust and its legacy a hallmark of his reign, and I had chronicled milestone after milestone in this process.

There had been frictions and setbacks, to be sure. Key among them was the pope's support for the canonization of his controversial World War II predecessor, Pius XII, and his refusal to open secret Vatican archives to clarify Pius' role during the Holocaust.

He also hurt Jews by welcoming Austrian President Kurt Waldheim to the Vatican after Waldheim's World War II links to the Nazis had come to light. And he upset Jews with his meetings at the Vatican with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

These episodes, however, were far outweighed by positive steps. Some of them were truly groundbreaking measures that jettisoned -- or at least shook up -- centuries of ingrained Catholic teaching and changed Catholic dogma to reflect respect for Jews and the Jewish religion and apologize for the persecution of Jews by Catholics.

They ranged from his visit to Rome's main synagogue in 1986, to his frequent meetings with rabbis, Holocaust survivors and Jewish lay leaders, to his repeated condemnation of anti-Semitism, to the establishment of relations between the Vatican and Israel, to John Paul's own pilgrimage to the Jewish state in 2000, when he prayed at the Western Wall.

It was evident throughout that he was deeply influenced by his own personal history of having grown up with Jewish friends in pre-World War II Poland and then witnessing the destruction during the Shoah.

As Berenbaum put it, John Paul II was "directly touched by the Holocaust" and "assumed responsibility for its memory."

The program director of a Catholic-run interfaith and dialogue center near the Auschwitz death camp agreed.

"Auschwitz was not an abstract tragedy but it formed part of his life," the Rev. Manfred Deselaers told the Catholic news agency Zenit.org. "Auschwitz was the school of holiness of John Paul II."

Given this background, it seemed fitting that the Vatican chose to beatify John Paul on May 1 -- the eve of this year's Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yom Hashoah.

The coincidence, though, was not intentional.

In the Catholic calendar, May 1 this year marked the Sunday after Easter, a feast called Divine Mercy Sunday. And John Paul II had died on the very eve of Divine Mercy Sunday in 2005.

Still, the timing sent out a powerful message. And it made me reflect on how very, very radically relations between Catholics and Jews have changed, even in just the past few decades.

Relations between Catholics and Jews are not perfect, of course, and they never will be. There are still anti-Semitic elements in the Church, and John Paul II's teachings have not trickled down to all the world's more than 1 billion Catholics. But we do live in a different world.

For centuries, the popes and the Vatican "worked hard to keep Jews in their subservient place -- barring them from owning property, from practicing professions, from attending university, from traveling freely," Brown University historian David Kertzer wrote in his 2001 book "The Popes Against the Jews." "And they did all this according to canon law and the centuries-old belief that in doing so they were upholding the most basic tenets of Christianity."

Here in Rome, the papal rulers kept Jews confined to a crowded ghetto until 1870. In many places Jews would stay indoors at Easter for fear of being caught up in a blood libel accusation or be accused of desecrating the Host.

Less dramatically, I still remember from childhood how Catholic kids in my suburban Philadelphia neighborhood were forbidden to enter synagogue to attend their friends' bar mitzvah services.

Formal dialogue began only in 1965, with the Vatican's Nostra Aetate declaration that repudiated the charge that Jews were collectively responsible for killing Jesus, stressed the religious bond between Jews and Catholics, and called for interfaith contacts.

Two decades later, in 1986, when John Paul became the first pope to visit a synagogue, he embraced Rome's chief rabbi, Elio Toaff, and declared that Jews were Christianity's "dearly beloved" and "elder brothers."

Toaff met frequently with John Paul, and the two established a warm rapport. In fact, Toaff and the pope's longtime secretary were the only two individuals named in John Paul's will. The rabbi called that inclusion "a significant and profound gesture for Jews" as well as "an indication to the Catholic world."

Long retired now, Toaff celebrated his 96th birthday on April 30 -- the day before John Paul's beatification.

The memory of John Paul "remains indelibly impressed in the collective memory of the Jewish people," Toaff said in a statement published after the beatification in the Vatican's official newspaper. "In the afflicted history of relations between the popes of Rome and the Jewish people, in the shadow of the ghetto in which they were closed for over three centuries in humiliating and depressing conditions, the figure of John Paul II emerges luminous in all of its exceptionality."

Can umbrella groups hold Jewish Europe together?

2011-05-18T02:01:00.000-07:00

My latest article on JTA is about the crisis in pan-European Jewish institutions.

By Ruth Ellen Gruber
(May 10, 2011)

ROME (JTA) -- Can umbrella organizations link Jews and Jewish institutions from Dublin to Dnepropetrovsk?

If so, what should be their form and focus? How should they be run? Who should fund them? Do such organizations even matter?

Recent upheavals in the acronymic world of pan-European Jewish institutions have raised these and other questions about the role and relevance of such umbrella groups.

The past six months have witnessed the near demise of one umbrella, the European Council of Jewish Communities, or ECJC; the launch of a new body, the European Jewish Union, which is run and financed by a Ukrainian billionaire; and a call from that union for a “European Jewish parliament," whose form and function are yet to be defined.

"There's a lot of confusion now," said Annie Sacerdoti, a Milan-based Jewish leader. "It's a time of passage, and we are waiting to see what happens."

While few of these developments have had any real impact on ordinary Jews or day-to-day Jewish life in Europe, they are part of a larger story of the shifting face of Jewish Europe.

The ECJC is at the heart of the recent polemics.

Founded more than 40 years to promote Jewish culture, heritage, education and community building, the ECJC came to prominence following the fall of communism. Funded by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, it fostered links among Jewish communities in Western Europe and emerging new communities in the East.

The JDC cut funding, however, and in recent years financial shortfalls all but curtailed its operation.

Last November, outgoing ECJC president Jonathan Joseph thought he had found a solution: He unilaterally appointed a Ukrainian billionaire, Igor Kolomoisky, as his successor in exchange for the promise of millions of dollars in support.

But Joseph made the move without consulting the organization’s board, and a number of members quit in protest, with some decrying a "Soviet-style takeover." Many balked at indications that Kolomoisky's agenda would change the ECJC into a political organization focused more on Israel than the organization’s traditional mission.

The rejection took Kolomoisky and his allies by surprise, and ultimately they decided to walk away from the ECJC and form a new body, the European Jewish Union.

It’s not yet clear what the new group will do. The EJU says on its website that it’s "a structure uniting all Jewish communities and organizations throughout Western, Eastern and Central Europe.” But its makeup, membership and mode of operation are unclear. One source familiar with the operation described it as a "private foundation."

The ECJC-EJU flap highlights the growing financial and demographic clout in Europe of Jews from Eastern European countries, and it has thrown into sharp relief differing models of how to foster Jewish life.

The EJU was launched in early April at a two-day conference held at the Euro Disney theme park outside Paris that turned into something of a brouhaha.

Organizers had billed the event as an ECJC conference devoted to Jewish education and youth, and envisioned it as a General Assembly-style gathering. They recruited Clive Lawton, a respected Jewish education consultant and co-founder of the Limmud movement, to plan the program for hundreds of young Jews brought in for the occasion, mainly from Germany, Ukraine and Russia.

But far more people signed up for spaces than were available, and communities that had been promised slots never got them. More than 100 people who paid had their participation canceled by the organization.

On top of that, several conference attendees told JTA that the educational content had been far overshadowed by a political agenda that took them by surprise. Rather than focusing on the ECJC’s traditional agenda, the conference culminated in the establishment of the EJU and included the endorsement of a vaguely defined European Jewish parliament to "speak and act on behalf of every Jew in Europe."

Lawton told JTA that he feared the educational aspect had simply been "window dressing."

One Western European Jewish student who attended the meeting but did not want to be identified by name said he felt manipulated.

"We had the sense that we were roped into endorsing something just by our presence,” the student said. “I had the sense that something was going on and that we were brought in there just to give it respectability."

The next chapter in the saga will come May 29, when representatives from a host of countries meet in Paris to roll back the clock and "re-establish the ECJC as a democratic organization."

"We want it to come back to life, to return to its democratic roots," said one person involved in the relaunch but who did not want to be quoted by name. "We think there is a place for a Jewish organization that does not focus on politics but on community life."

Whether this will work remains to be seen.

"Generally speaking, the practical impact of these roof organizations on Jewish life in Europe is not entirely clear," said Rabbi Josh Spinner, CEO of the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation, which funds Jewish culture and education projects in Central and Eastern Europe.

"Local communities and national unions tend to go it alone, and individuals and institutions do find many ways to connect without needing the fulcrum of a pan-European unifier," he said.

Still, Spinner added, there are issues that do need confronting across Europe. He cited recent attempts in several countries to limit or ban shechitah, or ritual slaughter.

"Perhaps stronger cooperation or a clearer definition of respective roles between the various pan-European Jewish roof organizations might better allow effectively dealing with such issues," Spinner said.

The planned relaunch of the ECJC, Spinner said, represented "an opportunity for the partner organizations to clarify their goals and set a timetable for achieving them. I hope they use the opportunity to make the ECJC a highly relevant organization."

Evan Lazar, a Prague-based lawyer involved in the relaunch, was hopeful. "The leaders of various Jewish organizations know the ECJC exists," he said. "I'm not sure that every Jew needs to know about it, but I would hope that every Jewish community leader, school director or other such activist does, and that it helps them do their jobs better by sharing resources and best practices."

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN: Egypt uprising carries echoes of Poland’s Solidarity movement 30 years ago

2011-04-25T01:45:00.001-07:00

By Ruth Ellen Gruber · February 15, 2011

NEW HAVEN, Conn. (JTA) -- The day after Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak was ousted by a widespread public uprising, I found myself presenting a lecture about Solidarity, the mass trade union movement that convulsed Poland 30 years ago and paved the way for the collapse of the Iron Curtain a decade later.

It also helped land me in jail in 1983, eventually resulting in my expulsion from Poland.

I had covered Solidarity -- Solidarnosc in Polish -- as a correspondent for United Press International, and my lecture came at the opening of an exhibition at Yale University about the dramatic strikes and public protests that gave birth to the movement in August 1980.

It got me thinking about people power -- its nature and the long, complex reach of its legacy.

The so-called Polish August was the first mass protest movement to achieve some success in challenging Communist rule in Eastern Europe.

When the strikes broke out, the Communists had been in power in Poland since the late 1940s -- similar to the length of Hosni Mubarak's tenure. And as in Egypt, the protests forced radical changes in less than three weeks.

But freedom and democracy were by no means the automatic outcome of what seemed at the moment a victory; indeed, what's happening in Egypt, and elsewhere in the Middle East, is still very much in flux.

Thousands of workers went on strike at the Gdansk Shipyard on Aug. 14, 1980. The walkout was sparked by the firing of crane operator Anna Walentynowicz, a longtime dissident worker activist.

Her dismissal was really just the straw that broke the camel's back. Hikes in food prices and other economic hardships, as well as heavy-handed political and social repression, were behind the discontent, and over the years there had been sporadic failed attempts to challenge the regime.

This time, circumstances were different.

For one thing, the election of Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II in 1978 had galvanized the nation and instilled a sense of national pride. When John Paul triumphantly returned home to visit in 1979, millions of Poles turned out to greet him as a national hero.

Strikes and protests spread across Poland within days of the Gdansk Shipyard walkout. Prayers and outdoor masses in the overwhelmingly Catholic country were a key part of the protests.

Significantly, too, workers and strike leaders formed an unprecedented strategic alliance with dissident intellectuals. Their list of 21 demands included labor reforms but also freedom of expression, freedom of religion and other civil rights.

These formed the basis of the Gdansk Agreement, a landmark social accord eventually signed on Aug. 31, 1980 by the charismatic strike leader Lech Walesa and a senior government representative. Walesa used a jumbo souvenir pen that bore a likeness of John Paul II.

Five days leader, the Polish Communist Party axed its longtime leader, Edward Gierek.

Various commentators have compared the events in Egypt with the fall of communism across Eastern Europe in 1989-90. The comparison is valid -- and perhaps increasingly so, given the spreading protests across the Middle East.

But in some ways the Polish August and the birth of Solidarity may be a more telling comparison, at least for now. As with Egypt, the Polish August was a huge global news story that sparked ecstatic heights of optimism, exhilaration and punditry. And as with the Egyptian uprising, it took us into utterly uncharted waters: No one really knew where it was all going to lead.

Confidence and expectations were high, but martial law crushed Solidarity less than a year-and-a-half after the Gdansk Agreement was signed. The movement was banned, hundreds of Solidarity leaders and activists were jailed, censorship was re-imposed and harsh controls were put in place.

In January 1983, I myself was arrested, accused of espionage, jailed, interrogated and expelled from Poland because of my journalistic activity -- apparently as a warning to both the international media and local Polish contacts.

Martial law, however, did not stop the process begun with the Polish August.

Dissent and efforts to foster civil society went underground, where they continued to build momentum as deteriorating economic conditions fueled mounting popular anger.

In Warsaw, for example, young Jews who tentatively had begun rediscovering their roots and religious heritage met in a semi-clandestine Jewish study group they called the Jewish Flying University because each meeting took place in a different apartment.

It took nearly eight years, but in 1989 round-table negotiations between the underground opposition and the government enabled a peaceful transition to democratic rule.

The images on the panels of the Solidarnosc exhibit at Yale this winter portray events that happened more than 30 years ago, but the pictures look uncannily similar to the images of the protests in Egypt. They show huge crowds, banners, slogans and confrontations between protesters and authorities.

Much has been made of the role of the social media in Egypt. Back in 1980, however, there were no social media. There was no Twitter, no Facebook, no mobile phones, no Internet, no e-mail, no 24/7-hour news cycle (except for us wire service folks). CNN was the only cable news network, and it had only just been founded.

The government, moreover, cut communications between Gdansk and Warsaw during the August strikes, so that in order to file their stories, some reporters actually commuted back and forth between the two cities on domestic flights. Information was carried by word of mouth or clandestine Samizdat newsletters, or shortwave broadcasts on the BBC or Radio Free Europe.

Still, word got out. Protests engulfed a nation and all but brought down a hated regime.

If enough people want to create change, they will, Twitter or not.

One image in the Yale exhibition shows the enormous sea of people gathered in downtown Warsaw to celebrate outdoor Mass with Pope John Paul II in 1979.

"I was in that crowd," Polish-born Yale professor Krystyna Illakowicz told me. "I remember feeling that we were not afraid any longer."

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN: Helping an Orphan of History Recover Its Past

2011-04-25T01:38:00.000-07:00

Helping an orphan of history recover its past

By Ruth Ellen Gruber · January 20, 2011

LVIV, Ukraine (JTA) -- It's not every day that you can help a city recover its history.

But that's what happened recently in Lviv, in western Ukraine, when I served on the jury for an international design competition to mark and memorialize key sites of Jewish heritage.

Sponsored by municipal authorities in association with the Lviv Center for Urban History and the German Society for Technical Cooperation, the competition was aimed at counteracting widespread, and sometimes willful, amnesia about the city's rich and convoluted past.

This amnesia, Deputy Mayor Vasyl Kosiv reminded us when our jury first convened, was the product of a century of often violent upheaval that left Lviv something of an orphan in history.

"Over the past 100 years, the ruling government changed at least eight times, often dramatically and often followed by tragic changes," said Kosiv, who also was a jury member.

An elderly person literally could have remained in Lviv all his or her life but have been born in Habsburg, Austria (when the city was known as Lemberg); gone to school in Poland (when it was called Lwow); spent adulthood in the Soviet Union (when it was known as Lvov), and be retired now in Ukraine.

War and conquest radically altered populations as well as borders.

Before World War II, when the city was part of Poland, more than half the population was ethnic Poles, about 15 percent was Ukrainians and one-third was Jewish. The more than 100,000 Jews formed the third-largest Jewish community in Poland.

But the Jewish community was annihilated in the Holocaust, with nearly all synagogues and other traces of Jewish history destroyed. And after the Soviet Union took over in 1944, most of the local Polish population was expelled westward and replaced by Ukrainians and Russians moved in from the east.

Lviv became a focus of Ukrainian national identity, its multi-ethnic history largely suppressed or forgotten.

The design competition for Jewish sites, the biggest such competition ever held in postwar Lviv, was conceived as a step toward recovering collective memory.

The official brief was "to respond to the growing awareness of Lviv's multi-ethnic past by contributing to the rediscovery of the city's Jewish history and heritage through creating public spaces dedicated to the city's historic Jewish community."

It singled out three key sites of Jewish history to be redesigned as memorial areas:

* the "Valley of Death" that was linked to the notorious Janivski camp set up by the German occupiers in World War II, where more than 100,000 Jews were killed;

* the site of two destroyed synagogues in the city's former downtown Jewish quarter, situated next to the visible ruins of the 16th century Golden Rose synagogue near the main market square;

* and the so-called "Besojlem," the small piece of open ground that is the only part of the destroyed old Jewish cemetery not built over. All the rest is now covered by a big bazaar, the Krakovsky Market.

Architects from the United States, Israel and 12 other countries submitted a total of 70 designs for the three sites.

Our nine-member jury was an international mix of architects, urban planners and other experts, each of whom was looking at the proposals from different viewpoints and experience.

For two days, in a drafty hall where the designs were displayed, we debated each proposal not simply on its appearance but on its feasibility of implementation, sensitivity to place and, importantly, on its sensitivity to Jewish concerns, including halachah, or Jewish law.

I was among three Jewish jury members. Though I am not an architect or urban planner, I have spent years analyzing the restoration and redevelopment of former Jewish quarters in post-communist Europe.

The other two Jewish jurors were the Lviv-born architectural historian Sergey Kravstov, from the Center for Jewish Art in Jerusalem, and Josef Zissels, the longtime head of one of Ukraine's national umbrella Jewish organizations.

The submissions were anonymous, so we had no idea from where they came.

In the end, remarkably, we were nearly unanimous in our choices for the three designs we awarded first prize in each category.

The team of Ming-Yu Ho, Ceanatha La Grange and Wei Huang, from Irvine, Calif., won first prize for the Janivski concentration camp site with a project that would turn the site into a form of land art -- a raised walkway curving around a slope covered with slabs representing symbolic tombstones.

The Berlin-based team of Franz Reschke, Paul Reschke and Frederik Springer won first prize for the synagogue square site, a design that incorporated the archeological excavations of one destroyed synagogue and traced the form of another.

And Ronit Lombrozo, of Jerusalem, won first prize for Besojlem with a design that was particularly sensitive to the fact that the space was a cemetery where bodies are still buried. It envisaged a raised walkway and also the use of unearthed tombstones as part of a memorial site.

Other prizes and honorable mentions went to designs from Italy, Poland, Germany, Austria and Ukraine.

It remains to be seen, of course, when and whether the winning projects will be carried through. Kinks in the designs need to be worked out, and funding must be raised. Still, the entire process bodes well for the future.

Indeed, I was particularly impressed that the winners included several young architects from Lviv who were in their early 20s. Their approaches to reintegrating a component of local history that has far too long been suppressed, ignored, forgotten and/or distorted were thoughtful and sensitive -- even though the world whose memory they were attempting to recover must seem to them by now like ancient history.

Berlusconi article

2010-12-13T09:12:00.000-08:00

My latest story on JTA is a news analysis of Silvio Berlusconi and the complicated political situation, from a Jewish angle.

With Berlusconi tottering, Israel-Italy ties appear safe
By Ruth Ellen Gruber · December 7, 2010

ROME (JTA) -- Dogged by sex and corruption scandals, a revolt by former political allies, and WikiLeaks’ revelations that U.S. diplomats consider him “feckless” and a mouthpiece for Russian leader Vladimir Putin, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is fighting for his political life.

A parliamentary confidence vote Dec. 14 may bring down the three-time prime minister's fractious center-right coalition and oust one of Israel's closest friends in Europe.

A collapse of the government next week should not have any immediate impact on relations between Italy and Israel, however. The two countries cooperate closely in a variety of fields, and Italy is among Israel's top economic partners in Europe. Any significant change in foreign policy would depend on whether early elections are called for the spring, and if so, what the outcome would be.

Berlusconi, 74, has a checkered record when it comes to Jewish issues. On the one hand, he’s been a strong supporter of Israel. Berlusconi has gone so far as to state that he "feels Israeli" and has called for Israel's inclusion in the European Union.

"Israel's security within its borders, as well as its right to exist as a Jewish state, is the ethical choice for Italians and a moral obligation against anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial," he said in a message to a pro-Israel rally in Rome in October.

At the same time, however, the prime minister is known for tasteless Holocaust-related gaffes. He was filmed this fall telling a joke about a Jew charging another Jew about $4,000 a day for hiding him during World War II. The punchline: "The Jew says, 'The question now is whether we should tell him Hitler is dead and the war is over.' "

In 2003, he angered local Jews with remarks that appeared to minimize the brutality of Italy's wartime fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini. But just days later, the Anti-Defamation League went ahead with a planned event honoring Berlusconi with its Distinguished Statesman Award.

"A friend is a friend even though he is flawed," ADL National Director Abraham Foxman told JTA at the time.

A billionaire media mogul who has dominated Italian politics since the mid-1990s, Berlusconi won a landslide victory in 2008 at the head of a center-right coalition that includes his center-right People of Freedom Party as well as the notoriously anti-immigrant Northern League.

With Berlusconi’s approval ratings now at an all-time low, he is battling opposition from the left and the right. His biggest immediate challenge comes from former ally Gianfranco Fini, 58, the speaker of the lower house of parliament, who is fighting Berlusconi in a bitter contest for leadership of the right wing.

Fini, also a staunch supporter of Israel, split with Berlusconi this summer, accusing him of corruption and anti-democratic party policies. Last month, Fini launched his own political party, Future and Freedom.

Fini, too, has a checkered past on Jewish issues. He is a former leader of the neo-fascist movement. But he broke with the far right a decade-and-a-half ago and since then has cultivated relations with Jews, visited Holocaust sites, publicly condemned fascism and even donned a kipah during his first trip to Israel in 2003.

"It is undeniable that Fini made big and probably sincere changes," said Annie Sacerdoti, the former editor of the Milan Jewish monthly Il Bollettino. But for some Jews, she said, “his past weighs on him.”

Italy is a highly polarized country, and to a large degree attitudes toward Berlusconi among Italy's 30,000 Jews are emblematic of general right-left political divisions.

Postwar Italian Jews tended to support the left. But in recent years the strong pro-Palestinian -- and in some cases virulently anti-Israel -- bent of much of the left has alienated growing numbers of Jews. This has translated into more support for Berlusconi and his right-wing allies at the ballot box.

"For some in the Jewish world, Berlusconi's unconditional support of Israel represents a guarantee that others do not give," Sacerdoti said. "He says he is a friend of Israel -- no ifs, ands or buts -- and this makes him credible to a part of the Jewish world.”

Yet many Italian Jews firmly oppose Berlusconi's overall politics. Some prominent Jews, including the left-wing member of parliament Emanuele Fiano, are active in an association called The Left for Israel, a group of politicians and others who support the Jewish state from a left-wing perspective.

Some critics describe Berlusconi's vocal backing of Israel as a functional friendship aimed at winning Italian and international Jewish support.

Berlusconi and his allies "are full of declarations of love for Israel, but they are indifferent to local Jewish issues,” said Rabbi Ariel Haddad, director of the Jewish Museum in the northeast Italian city of Trieste. “I am happy that they support Israel, but they seem to see Israel as the only Jewish issue.”
Whatever the motivation, the support for Israel has trickled down to the local level, in some cases in surprisingly high-profile ways.

Rome's right-wing mayor, Gianni Alemanno, was instrumental last year in having captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit declared an honorary citizen of the city, and a giant picture of Shalit hangs on the outside wall of Rome's city hall, the Campidoglio.

With Berlusconi struggling to retain power in the face of Fini’s political revolt, public dissatisfaction and sex scandals -- including allegations of "bunga bunga" sex parties and improper relations with teenage women, among them a Moroccan belly dancer known as Ruby Heart-Stealer -- Italian Jews soon may have to reconsider their political loyalties.

"Whether Berlusconi or Fini prevails, one looming question will be whether a modern, non-fascist Italian right can survive and achieve success without the questionable support of the far-right, xenophobic Northern League," said Francesco Spagnolo, an Italian Jewish scholar who works as a the curator of the Magnes Collection at a library at the University of California, Berkeley. "This will have repercussions."

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- Start-up Continent

2010-11-12T01:35:00.000-08:00

My latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column on JTA once again attempts to demonstrate to the "outside world" that there is Jewish life in Europe.....

Startup continent: European Jewry
By Ruth Ellen Gruber · November 10, 2010
ROME (JTA) -- When I was in the United States recently, I gave a series of talks on contemporary Jewish life in Europe. One of my aims was to shed light on some of the creative new initiatives that are shaping the Jewish experience here, often against considerable odds and expectations.

"My eyes were opened to a Jewish world I had no idea existed," one woman told me.

Having written about the Jewish experience in Europe for many years, I sometimes forget how surprised people can be by developments that by now I take for granted.

Americans accustomed to viewing Europe through the prism of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism can be taken aback when they come face to face with such living Jewish realities as newly opened synagogues, crowded Jewish singles weekends and hip-hop klezmer fusion bands.

"American Jews don't tend to think about European Jewry often, and when we do, it is to lament its imminent demise, the victim of an aging, diminishing population and a sharply disturbing increase in anti-Semitism," Gary Rosenblatt, the editor of The New York Jewish Week, wrote this summer.
Some folks -- metaphorically I hope -- go so far as to express shock to find that a country such as Poland is "in color."

"Where had I seen Poland outside of World War II newsreels, Holocaust movies and photos, and, of course, 'Schindler's List'?" Rob Eshman, the editor of the Los Angeles Jewish Journal wrote last month after visiting Poland for the first time. "That entire movie was in black and white, except for the fleeting image of a tragic figure, a doomed little Jewish girl in a bright red dress."

The American Jewish challenge when it comes to modern Poland, he admitted, "is to reverse the 'Schindler's List' images, to see the country as mostly color, with a little black and white."

An optimistic new report now provides statistical backup for the bold new Jewish realities in Europe that I described in my talks.

Published last month, the 2010 Survey of New Jewish Initiatives in Europe aims to provide a "comprehensive snapshot" of Jewish startups -- that is, of "autonomous or independent non-commercial European initiatives" that have been established within the past decade.

"Conventional discussions of Europe often emphasize anti-Semitism, Jewish continuity, and anti-Israel activism," the survey's introduction states. "While we do not dismiss or diminish those concerns, we know that these are only part of the story. The European Jewry we know is confident, vibrant, and growing."

The findings are remarkably positive.

The survey presents data on 136 European Jewish startups and estimates that some 220 to 260 such initiatives are currently in operation, nearly half of them in the former Soviet Union and other post-communist states.

"There are more Jewish startups per capita in Europe than in North America," it says.

These initiatives, the study says, reach as many as 250,000 people, of whom about 41,000 are "regular participants and core members." They span a broad range of ages and affiliation, although European Jewish startup leaders and founders themselves "tend to affiliate with progressive and secular/cultural forms of Judaism."

Other findings reveal that the "vast majority" of these new Jewish initiatives are focused mainly on "Jewish education, arts and culture, or community building," and most of their financing comes from foundation grants and "grass-roots labor."

The survey was carried out by Jumpstart, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that promotes Jewish innovation, in cooperation with the British Pears Foundation and the ROI Community for Young Jewish Innovators based in Jerusalem.

I asked Shawn Landres, Jumpstart's co-founder, whether he thought the survey's findings presented a picture that was too rosy given the challenges still faced by European Jewry.

"I don't think the survey is overly optimistic," he told me. "The numbers of initiatives and the number of people involved (especially the otherwise unaffiliated) are accurate indicators of the creativity of European Jewry."
Still, he conceded, "the financial figures, especially the small budgets and low number of individual financial contributors, indicate just how fragile they are."

Landres noted that the demographic challenges facing European Jews -- long a hot topic for strategic planners -- were "complex." But, he said, they could not be reduced to "a single line in a single direction."

"Even if Jewish numbers in Europe are stagnating or declining overall, the threat or opportunity is in the details," he said. "What about intermarried families that identify as Jewish? What about the 80,000 or so people engaged by these new initiatives who have no other connection to the organized Jewish community? What about key population centers like London, Budapest, and Berlin that will remain Jewishly vibrant for generations to come?"

Landres said the fact that the survey showed nearly twice as many startups per capita in Europe as in North America "should challenge a few stereotypes."

But, he added, "I suppose it shouldn't have been surprising, given the number of respondents who feel that established institutions simply aren't making room for them and their peers."
Landres said all the initiatives analyzed in the survey were in operation as of this year, but he acknowledged that some may not last.

"Even so," he said, "projects need not be permanent to have impact, and the people involved frequently move on to other more successful Jewish communal endeavors armed with invaluable experience. Without risk and tolerance for failure, we cannot make transformative progress."

Tablet Magazine -- Heym on the Range

2010-11-09T02:41:00.000-08:00

Here's my recently story for Tablet Magazine about David Dortort, the creator of the iconic TV western Bonanza, who died Sept. 5. I had the pleasure and privilege of spending an afternoon with Dortort and his wife when I was the Visiting Scholar at the Autry National Center in December 2004, working on my continuing and ongoing project on the American West in the European Imagination.

Heym on the Range

By Ruth Ellen Gruber (Nov. 4, 2010)

Some years ago, when I first visited Sikluv Mlyn, a Wild West theme park in the Czech Republic, I was startled by the music piped in to the lobby of my hotel. It was the unmistakable theme song from the iconic TV show Bonanza–sung in Czech.

Bonanza, which ran from 1959 to 1973, recounted the adventures of the tight-knit Cartwright clan—the patriarch Ben, his three sons Adam, Hoss, and Little Joe—and the goings-on at their sprawling Ponderosa ranch. Syndicated to dozens of countries and dubbed into languages ranging from German to Japanese, it was one of the most popular and widely watched television shows of all time and has had a tremendous impact in honing the image of the American West around the world.

But few viewers realize how deeply rooted the show was in, well, Yiddishkeit (and not just because two of the stars—Lorne Greene as Ben and Michael Landon as Little Joe—were Jewish).

Bonanza was the brainchild of David Dortort, a pioneering television writer and producer who died in September at the age of 93. The Brooklyn-born son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, Dortort had a lifelong commitment to Jewish causes; among other things, he and his wife Rose, who died in 2007, endowed cultural programs at the American Jewish University and Hillel at UCLA.

I discussed the Jewish underpinnings of Bonanza with Dortort during a lengthy interview at his home in Los Angeles in December 2004, as part of my ongoing research on the American West in the European imagination.

Bonanza’s story lines, he told me, centered on relationships rather than good guy-bad guy gunplay and stressed the values of love, respect, and family ties. He had employed these values, he said, to create a mythic world along the lines of the Arthurian legends, with the Ponderosa a sort of American Camelot and Ben Cartwright a King Arthur figure.

He named the Cartwright patriarch Ben after his own father, a yeshiva bokher who immigrated to the United States at 15 and became an insurance broker in Brooklyn. It wasn’t just a name that the two shared. “Essentially the values that I put into Bonanza are Jewish values that I learned in my home, from my father,” he told me. “One of the great things about the United States is that it’s probably the only country in the history of the world that can be described as a Judaic-Christian civilization. Where else did the Jewish people have the freedom they have in this country and enjoy the opportunities?”

Toward the end of our talk, Dortort shifted the conversation away from Bonanza. He told me a family story that shed light on how his own relationship to myth—and to the West—may have been shaped in part by the exploits of his Uncle Harry, a ne’er-do-well in the Old Country who wound up fighting alongside Pancho Villa in Mexico and battling anti-Semites on a California ranch.

In Dortort’s telling, Harry, his father’s younger brother, left Galicia in about 1916; he made his way to Hamburg and got a job on a ship. Soon, Dortort said, “he finds himself off the coast of Mexico and at a port called Tampico, on the Caribbean, and he hears about a fantastic guy in the interior, deep in the Sierra Madre, called Pancho Villa.”
Harry “jumps ship and makes his way into the Sierra Madre somehow to join Pancho Villa. He fights with Villa against the government of Mexico, and they became very close.” Harry, Dortort said, “was a tough little character. He was known as Pancho Villa’s Jew.”

According to Dortort, Harry was with Pancho Villa in March 1916 when Villa carried out a bloody raid on a U.S. Army garrison at Columbus, New Mexico. Soon after, Harry followed Villa’s advice and fled to Texas—specifically to San Antonio, where there was a Jewish community. There, Dortort recounted, Harry spied a woman on the porch of a house, brushing her long, black hair. “He knows this is a Jewish section of town, so he calls up to her in Yiddish, ‘Are you a Jew?’ And she looks down and says, ‘Yes, but who are you and what do you want to know for?’ He looks up and says, ‘Do you want to get married?’ And she hesitated a moment and said, ‘OK!’ ”

Harry and his bride headed west to California, where they operated a citrus ranch near Pomona. By 1920 or 1921, Harry had become so successful that he arranged for his brother Ben to bring his family out to California from Brooklyn.
Dortort was only 4 or 5 years old. “It was beautiful,” he recalled. “No smog in those days, the mountains were clear, and there was snow on them; southern California was like paradise.”

Nearly 40 years later, he created Bonanza.

Read story at Tablet Magazine HERE

Following in Gustav Mahler's footsteps in the Czech Republic

2010-10-16T21:00:00.000-07:00

My latest piece in the International Herald Tribune/New York Times online:

On the Trail of Gustav Mahler
By RUTH ELLEN GRUBER
Published: October 15, 2010
KALISTE, CZECH REPUBLIC — I slept very well in the house where Gustav Mahler was born, waking in the morning to the bright sound of chirping birds in the trees outside my window.

Once a shop and tavern run by the composer’s father, Mahler’s birthplace is now a snug, family-run pension whose amenities include a modern little concert hall as well as a cozy, wood-paneled pub.

Born on July 7, 1860, Mahler spent only the first few months of his life here before his family moved to the busy regional center of Jihlava, known in German as Iglau, about 30 kilometers, or 20 miles, away.

But Kaliste remains an essential stop for Mahler pilgrims, and I made the sleepy little hamlet my headquarters when I spent a late-summer weekend following the trail of the composer’s early life in the beautiful Vysocina highlands of Bohemia and Moravia.

This year and next mark two Mahler anniversaries: 150 years since his birth in Kaliste and, in May, 100 years since his death in Vienna.

Kicked off by a gala commemorative concert in Kaliste on Mahler’s birthday, the anniversaries are being celebrated with performances, festivals, exhibitions, publications, memorials, Web sites and other tributes.

I decided to visit the composer’s boyhood haunts as my own way of paying homage. The Vysocina region, about halfway between Prague and Brno, is one of my favorite parts of the Czech Republic — in Mahler’s day, of course, it formed part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Although he moved to Vienna at the age of 15 to study music, Mahler returned frequently for holidays and drew lasting inspiration from the landscape and local traditions.

“Mahler needs a remembrance of boyhood sights and sounds before he can write a note,” wrote the British critic Norman Lebrecht in “Why Mahler?: How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed the World,” a biography of the composer that came out this year.

Setting off from Kaliste, I followed narrow back routes through stately forests and rolling fields. Heavily laden apple and plum trees lined many of the winding roads, and goldenrod flecked the fields where corn stood tall, waiting for the harvest.

With Mahler’s symphonies playing loudly on the car stereo, I could easily appreciate how landscape and memory were powerfully reflected in the music.

“We would go for walks lasting half the day,” Mahler’s boyhood friend Fritz Lohr once recalled, “wandering among flowery meadows, by abundant streams and pools, through the great woods, and to villages where authentic Bohemian musicians set lads and lasses dancing in the open air.” I drove north to Ledec nad Sazavou, a small town on the Sazava River dominated by a soaring castle.

Mahler’s beloved mother, Marie, came from Ledec, and as a child, Mahler frequently visited his relatives there. The story goes that his grandfather Abraham Herrmann, a wealthy soap manufacturer, introduced the 4-year-old Gustav to music by letting him play an old piano stored in his attic.

Herrmann and his wife, Theresia, are buried side by side in the Ledec Jewish cemetery, a centuries-old graveyard that is reached through a gate from the municipal cemetery at the edge of town. The synagogue in Ledec — where some accounts say that the infant Gustav’s circumcision ceremony took place — still stands. Built in 1739, it was restored some years ago and now serves as a concert and exhibition hall.

From Ledec, it’s a 25-minute drive to Zeliv, a village at the confluence of the Zelivka and Trnava rivers. When he was a student, Mahler would come here on vacation to visit his friend Emil Freund, and it was in Zeliv that he had his first romantic involvement, with a cousin of Emil’s named Marie Freund.

Zeliv’s main attraction is a sprawling monastery complex, dominated by the majestic church of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary. The monastery was closed down during the communist era, but religious life resumed in 1991, and today white-robed monks lead regular services in the ornate sanctuary of the church.

The little town of Humpolec makes a triangle with Zeliv and Kaliste. It was market day when I arrived, and I threaded my way through the stalls on the main square to get to the town museum, where a small permanent exhibition of photographs, documents and other material on Mahler opened in 1986.

Mahler’s paternal grandparents and other Mahler relatives are buried in the walled and tree-shaded Jewish cemetery, which lies just outside town in parkland beneath the ruins of the medieval Orlik Castle. The Freund family, including Marie, who committed suicide in 1880, also are buried here.
The Humpolec synagogue still stands near the center of town, but it now serves as a church. Jihlava, where Mahler lived from infancy until he left to study in Vienna in 1875, was my last stop on this exploration of his youth.

Many specific sites in the town are connected with Mahler’s boyhood and family life: the towering St. Jakub Church is said to be the where Mahler, who converted to Roman Catholicism in 1897, first heard a Mass.

The house at 4 Znojemska, where the family lived, is just a few steps from the large and graceful main square — which today is somewhat blighted by a modern commercial structure in its center.
The Mahler house now serves as a museum that focuses on his family and his relationship with Jihlava and the surrounding region, as well as on the Czech, German and Jewish traditions that made up the cultural landscape of his time.

Mahler’s parents are buried in the Jewish cemetery, but the synagogue was destroyed by the Germans in 1939. The ruins of its foundations have now been incorporated into what is called Gustav Mahler Park, a rather jarring sculptural arrangement reminiscent of Stonehenge that centers on a bizarrely attenuated statue of the composer.

The park was opened this summer as part of Mahler anniversary celebrations. The day I visited, a bride and groom were using it as a backdrop for their wedding photos.

More information is online. For the Czech Mahler Trail, go to gustavmahler2010.cz; the Mahler Pension in Kaliste, mahler-penzion.cz/en/; and the Mahler House Museum in Jihlava, mahler.cz/en/

Article -- Calabrian village honors Philadelphia artist

2010-09-24T10:00:00.000-07:00

I have an article in the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent about the opening of the permanent exhibition of my mother's art work in Nocara, Calabria.

Italian Village Honors Work of Philly Artist
September 23, 2010

Ruth Ellen Gruber
Jewish Exponent Feature
NOCARA, Italy

Shirley Moskowitz
During the 1970s and '80s, my parents spent considerable chunks of time in southern Italy, documenting local life in Nocara, a wind-swept Calabrian village that clings to the crest of a half-mile-high hill overlooking the Gulf of Taranto.

My father, Jacob W. Gruber, was an anthropologist at Temple University, and was there to carry out an ethnographic study. He visited peasant homes and observed local events, interviewed and photographed people, and took reams of notes about local customs, traditions and beliefs.

My mother, the artist Shirley Moskowitz, recorded village life her own way.

Setting up her easel in odd corners of the town, she painted dozens of landscapes, townscapes and portraits that keenly captured both the harshness of the sunbaked uplands and the living face of a village that was just emerging from an age-old traditional lifestyle into modernity.

My mother died in 2007.

This past August, on what would have been her 90th birthday, Nocara honored her memory and her creativity by opening a permanent exhibit of some 40 of her artworks in the main chamber of the local town hall.
My father, who is now 89, and my brother, Sam, flew to Italy, and together we drove eight hours south from my home in Umbria to be guests of honor at the opening ceremony.

As we walked through Nocara's narrow streets, Dad was accosted by villagers who remembered "il professore" and my mother from the old days. Some of them now are middle-aged adults whose likenesses my mother had drawn when they were children.

Many angles of town leaped out at us as if from one of Mom's paintings: a rough stone archway, the flat face of a chapel in its little piazza, steep stone lanes and tiled roofs.

Much has changed, of course. Pigs no longer graze in Nocara's streets, as I recall seeing them do when I visited my parents there decades ago. And donkeys are no longer a major means of transport. Moreover, Nocara now has gas, running water and other modern utilities, including Internet access.

A Posthumous Thanks

"Shirley Moskowitz's paintings represent a piece of Nocara, at a special time in its history," Mayor Franco Trebisacce told the several dozen people who attended the ceremony. "We have an obligation to display them here, and to offer our posthumous thanks to an artist who loved this town, and to her family."

Synagogue collage by artist Shirley Moskowitz
The exhibit, in fact, was a long time coming.
My parents had donated Mom's art works to Nocara a decade ago.

The gift had made headlines in local newspapers at the time, but the works were never permanently displayed, and for the past eight years or so they had languished in storage, almost forgotten.
Mayor Trebisacce, who came to office last year, remembered them, however, and became curious about their fate. Earlier this summer, he and his aides found them in a closet, packed away in their original shipping case.

A Google search took them to the Web site that my family had created about my mother's art after her death -- shirleymoskowitz.wordpress.com -- and they contacted us by leaving a comment on the site.

Many of the works that Mom donated to Nocara had already been exhibited at several major shows in Philadelphia, including a landmark retrospective at the University of the Arts in 1996 that had showcased more than half-a-century of my mother's life in art.

Her work encompassed a variety of media -- from simple line drawings and sketches to sculpture, oils and the joyously complex, multilayered collages that, since the 1960s, had become her signature style.

Some of her paintings and drawings now on display in Nocara, in fact, formed the basis of several of her major collages, such as "Wedding Procession," dating from 1988.

Looking back, Mom was an intensely Jewish artist, but not a "Jewish artist," per se.

She never created Jewish ritual art, though she frequently turned to Jewish themes and subject matter.
One of her first sculptures, dating from 1942, is a study of a huddled man and woman called "Refugees," and other sculptures, prints and paintings depict a cantor, a rabbi, Jewish holidays and life-cycle events, even a solemn moment from the Aleinu prayer.

A collage she created as a sort of multi-textured self-portrait prominently included Shabbat candlesticks, even though she herself was not observant.

And following a trip she took with me in Eastern Europe in 1992, she produced a particularly powerful series of monotype prints of some of the ruined synagogues and Jewish cemeteries that we visited.
But these -- like her Judaism itself -- were all part of the much broader kaleidoscope of her life. Her work, in fact, embraced and reflected the wide variety of landscapes, friends, family and experiences that made up her world.

Her collages in particular mixed dreams and reality to project a richly textured vision of life as she lived and perceived it, among her family, friends, neighbors and the local environment.

As she once put it, they were based "on personal experience and are composed to affect the viewer from a distance while at the same time inviting him to participate in the action -- to experience through color, dynamic contrasts of light and dark, and various techniques, a reality that may seem fantastic but is still real."

Ruthless Cosmopolitan -- Savoring "goulash Judaism" in Budapest

2010-09-16T13:05:00.000-07:00

Sharansky nails a mezuzah to the doorpost of the new Israeli Cultural Institute in Budapest. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

My latest "Ruthless Cosmopolitan" column for JTA recounts some of my experiences at Rosh Hashanah this year in Budapest. A lot more was going on of course, but I would have needed a clone....

Savoring "goulash Judaism" in the Hungarian capital

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

JTA -- Sept. 16, 2010

BUDAPEST (JTA) -- I always try to spend at least part of the High Holidays in Budapest, so I can sample some of the spicy mixture that characterizes the Jewish experience in the Hungarian capital.

As many as 90,000 Jews live in Budapest, the largest Jewish population in any central European city. The vast majority are unaffiliated -- and probably always will be.

Those who do identify as Jews, however tenuously, have an evolving choice of public and private, religious, cultural and secular ways to express or explore their identity.

Gastronomic, too: This year, one friend made challah for the first time to serve at the holiday dinner, and a downtown restaurant even offered a special Rosh Hashanah menu.

Call it "goulash Judaism," if you will -- a simmering mix whose disparate, and often fractious, components combine to form a highly seasoned whole.

Events and observances this year bore witness to the growing array of Jewish options, both inside and outside traditional settings.

The week leading up to Rosh Hashanah, for example, saw the conclusion of the city's 13th annual Jewish Summer Festival, a 10-day series of performances and other events, including a book and crafts fair, that drew thousands of visitors. Also that week, an ambitious Israeli Cultural Institute opened in a refurbished building at the edge of the main old downtown Jewish quarter.

And further afield, in the Obuda district in the northern part of the city, a 190-year-old synagogue that had been used for decades as a state TV studio was rededicated as a Jewish house of worship.
Rented from the state and restored by Chabad, the synagogue will form part of Chabad's growing local network.

Foreign VIPs were in town for all three occasions.

The Jewish Summer Festival culminated with a well-publicized concert by the Chasidic reggae rapper Matisyahu in a major city event arena.

Jewish Agency Chairman Natan Sharansky affixed the mezuzah to the doorpost of the Israeli Cultural Institute, which was largely funded by the agency. Institute director Gabor Balazs said the institute's aim was to introduce and popularize Israel's "mosaic-like" culture to the Jewish and non-Jewish public at large.

And Israel's Ashkenazi chief rabbi, Yonah Metzger, joined Chabad rabbis in cutting the ribbon at the Obuda synagogue.

"This is the best possible answer to what the Nazis did," Metzger told the crowd of 1,000 or more, including Hungarian government and religious leaders, attending the ceremony. "Fifty years after the last time Rosh Hashanah was celebrated here, it will be celebrated here once again."

My own holiday observances also reflected new choices.

I usually attend High Holidays services at one of the 15 or so mainstream synagogues active in Budapest, or sometimes I "synagogue hop" to two or three shuls. Most of them belong to the Neolog movement -- the Hungarian variant of Reform Judaism that is the country's dominant religious stream. But there are also several traditional Orthodox synagogues, as well three or four now affiliated with Chabad.

This year I chose to avoid the mainstream. I sampled Rosh Hashanah services at two small alternative groups -- Bet Orim, one of Budapest's two American-style Reform congregations, and Dor Chadash, a young people's minyan associated with the Masorti, or Conservative, movement.

As neither Reform nor Masorti is recognized by the Hungarian Jewish Federation, both operate outside the umbrella of establishment Jewry.

Bet Orim celebrated a formal service in the auditorium of the Budapest JCC, while Dor Chadash held a more informal gathering in the living room of the local Moishe House, a downtown apartment that serves as a combination residence and center for Jewish educational encounters.

Each group numbered about 30 or 35 people, and both offered an American-style egalitarian Jewish prayer experience that is alien to mainstream Hungarian Jewry.

At Bet Orim, in fact, a young woman named Flora Polnauer served as the cantor for High Holidays services.
"It's the first time that a Hungarian Jewish woman has fulfilled this role," Bet Orim's rabbi, Ferenc Raj, told me proudly.

Raj, a native of Hungary, moved to the United States decades ago and is rabbi emeritus of Congregation Beth El in Berkeley, Calif.

"We are making history tonight," he said.

I had met Polnauer before under quite different circumstances. The daughter of a rabbi, she sings with several local music groups, including hard-driving Jewish hip hop bands.

During the service, dressed in white, she chanted the familiar melodies in a lilting voice. But she looked a little nervous and was clearly moved by the experience.

"I really feel we deserve the Shehecheyanu!" she exclaimed at the end, referring to the blessing recited to mark special occasions and moments of joy.

We all joined in and chanted it with her: "Blessed are you, O Lord, our God, sovereign of the universe who has kept us alive, sustained us, and enabled us to reach this season."

European Day of Jewish Culture

2010-09-01T01:32:00.000-07:00

My latest JTA article deals with the annual European Day of Jewish Culture -- a topic I have written about on a fairly regular basis in the 11 eleven years since it was established. Indeed, I took part in the meeting in Paris in 1999 when it was decided to expand the regional "open doors" to Jewish heritage events in Alsace into an international initiative.

Despite being in its 11th year, the "Day" is still fairly unknown -- except in a few places, such as Italy, where it has become a high-profile event on the end-of-summer calendar, with lots of media coverage and support from state and local authorities.

Tourists shop in a store in the former Jewish district of Pitigliano that sells kosher wine, matzah, Jewish pastries and souvenirs. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Introducing non-Jewish Europeans to Jewish life
By Ruth Ellen Gruber · August 31, 2010

PITIGLIANO, Italy (JTA) -- In Italy, where there are only about 25,000 affiliated Jews in a population of 60 million, most Italians have never knowingly met a Jew. "It's unfortunate," said the Italian Jewish activist Sira Fatucci, "but in Italy Jews and the Jewish experience are often mostly known through the Holocaust."

Fatucci is the national coordinator in Italy for the annual European Day of Jewish Culture, an annual transborder celebration of Jewish traditions and creativity that takes place in more than 20 countries on the continent on the first Sunday of September -- this year, Sept. 5.

Synagogues, Jewish museums and even ritual baths and cemeteries are open to the public, and hundreds of seminars, exhibits, lectures, book fairs, art installations, concerts, performances and guided tours are offered.
The main goal is to educate the non-Jewish public about Jews and Judaism in order to demystify the Jewish world and combat anti-Jewish prejudice.

“What we are trying to do is to show the living part of Judaism -- to show life," Fatucci said. "What we want to do is to use culture as an antidote to ignorance and anti-Semitism.”

Some 700 people flock to Culture Day events each year in Pitigliano, a rust-colored hilltown in southern Tuscany that once had such a flourishing Jewish community that it was known as Little Jerusalem. Most local Jews moved away before World War II, and today only four Jews live here in a total population of 4,000. But in recent years the medieval ghetto area has become an important local attraction. The town produces kosher wine, and a new shop sells souvenir packets of matzah and Jewish pastries.

Culture Day events here include kosher food and wine tastings, guided tours, art exhibits and an open-air klezmer concert.

"There's a lot of ignorance, but a lot of curiosity about Jews," said Claudia Elmi, who works at Pitigliano's Jewish museum, which opened in the 1990s and now attracts 22,000 to 24,000 visitors a year -- the vast majority non-Jews. "But the Jews were seen as closed, or even physically closed off," she said. "The open doors of the Day of Culture are very important."

Tourists line up to tour the Jewish museum and the synagogue, a 16th-century gem that fell into ruin following World War II and was rebuilt and reopened in 1995. They make their way down steep stairs into the former mikvah and matzah bakery, which are located in rough-hewn subterranean chambers carved into the solid rock.

"We didn't know anything about Judaism before coming here," said Rosanna and Paolo, tourists from Padova who visited Pitiligano's Jewish sites a week before Culture Day. "We learned a lot here, particularly about the religious rituals and kosher food."

Now in its 11th year, Culture Day is loosely coordinated by the European Council of Jewish Communities, B'nai B'rith Europe and the Red de Juderias, a Jewish tourism route linking 21 Spanish cities. Countries participating this year include Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Holland, Norway, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. This year’s theme is "Art and Judaism."

Each country makes its own programs, and depends on local resources and volunteers to host, plan and carry out activities. Thus in some countries, only a few events take place: Norway will have a klezmer concert and lecture in Oslo; Bosnia has only an art exhibit in Sarajevo. Elsewhere, a varied feast may stretch for several days. In Britain, this year's activities last until Sept. 15 and include dozens of events in London and more than 20 other cities.

Jewish art "is both distinctive and universal" said Lena Stanley-Clamp, the director of the London-based European Association for Jewish Culture. "It certainly speaks to and is enjoyed by people of all backgrounds."
Italy is by far the European Day of Jewish Culture's most enthusiastic participant. Thanks to Fatucci and her army of volunteers and communal organizers, it has grown to become a high-profile fixture on the late-summer calendar, with events and activities up and down the Italian boot.

Last year's events attracted 62,000 people -- about one-third the total number who attended Jewish Culture Day events around the continent and about twice the number of Jews in Italy. This year, activities are being staged in 62 towns, cities and villages, including many places -- like Pitigliano -- where few or no Jews live.

"There is a great curiosity about Jews and Jewish culture here, so the opportunity to engage in a Jewish cultural activity is very attractive," Fatucci said. "The Day of Jewish Culture became a reference point for this."
Part of the success, she said, was due to the fact that Culture Day in Italy is so well organized and publicized. Jewish communities work closely with public and private institutions, and the event receives government support and recognition.

But, Fatucci added, Jewish heritage in Italy encompasses a remarkably rich and varied array of treasures -- Roman-era Jewish catacombs in Rome, medieval mikvahs, Baroque synagogues, and the historic ghetto and centuries-old Jewish cemetery in Venice.

"Italy is the country of art, par excellence," Fatucci said. "But in many places, people have lived side by side with fragments of Jewish culture without knowing anything about them -- or even knowing they were there."

(For a program of European Day of Jewish Culture events, visit Jewisheritage.org.)

Read full article at jta.org

Symposium and Exhibit in Nocara, Calabria

2010-08-08T08:48:00.000-07:00

Here's a crosspost from the Shirley Moskowitz web site -- a brief report on the symposium and opening of a permanent exhibit of my mother's art work in the remte village of Nocara, Calabria, last week. You can see other posts at the web site.

Nocara — Exhibit Opening and Conference

August 6, 2010 by ruthellengruber | Edit

The event in Nocara August 4 opening the permanent exhibit of works that Shirley Moskowitz did there in the 1970s and 1980s and donated to the village 10 years ago was a great success – and lots of fun. The art works — townscapes, landscapes and portraits, mainly in watercolor, ink or pencil — are hung in the Town Council meeting room, and this, says Mayor Franco Trebisacce, is where they will remain, as a testament to the history of the village at a time when it was just on the verge of change from the age-old traditional lifestyle to modernity.

The speakers — two professors from the University of Cosenza and Vincenzo Salerno, the former longtime mayor of Nocara — discussed both the context of the works as well as the development of the village and the importance of the collection, and what it represents, for the town. Salerno recalled that Mom and Dad visited Nocara for lengthy periods of time over several years, at various seasons of the year. He noted that back then, it was still a largely peasant society, where donkeys were used for transport and animals were kept in town. Few men under retirement age lived in town, as most had immigrated northward to find work. Sam then spoke about the art itself. And we were presented with an engraved plaque as thanks for Mom’s work.

Dad gave a very moving little speech about Mom and her life as an artist — I recorded it and will try to post as an mp3.

There was an enthusiastic turnout, including a number of people who remembered Mom and Dad from the old days. Many people came up to Dad to reminisce — and Dad’s Italian rose to the occasion. The few people I knew from my own two visits to Nocara many years ago were there — and even to me recognizable, including Vincenzo Salerno, his brother Cici, and Giuseppe and Maria De Mateo.

Vincenzo Salerno, Dad, Cici Salerno

There were several people in attendance who now, as adults, were able to see the portraits Mom did of them as children. Few of these people still live in Nocara (though some were back for summer vacation). Ernesto (shown here) is one of the few younger people who still lives in the town. We kept hearing over and over that Nocara is now was just “a town of old people.”

Ernesto, then and now

The event kicked off the annual summer pork festival (Festa del Maiale) — and the evening concluded amid an outdoor grilled feast, loud music, and dancing in the piazza. (Including with Cici Salerno — with whom I remember dancing in the piazza in 1981!)

Mayor Trebisacce

The festival culminates with a big religious procession of the Madonna on August 15, either to or from the old monastery chapel of Santa Maria degli Antropici way down a very winding road from the village.

Nocara on top of its hill

Shepherd and his dog and Vespa outside the monastery

Ruthless Cosmopolitan -- Shabbatons for non-Jews in Poland

2010-08-07T03:55:00.000-07:00

My latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column for JTA is about how a "public display of Judaism" is being used in a country where the Jewish presence dwarfs the actual number of Jews who live there.

In Poland, Shabbatons for non-Jews to combat anti-Semitism
By Ruth Ellen Gruber · August 2, 2010

PIOTRKOW TRYBUNALSKI, Poland (JTA) -- Whenever I visit Poland, I'm struck by how the intensity of the Jewish presence dwarfs the tiny number of Jews who actually live in the country.
Even with the resurgence of Jewish life since the fall of communism, organized Jewish communities exist in fewer than a dozen Polish cities, and only the Warsaw community numbers much more than a few hundred people.

Yet each year sees hundreds of Jewish-themed festivals, conferences, educational projects, commemorative activities, publications and other initiatives throughout the country.

"I often joke that the mayor of every small town now feels obliged to make excuses if he or she has no Jewish festival," said Anna Dodziuk, a Jewish activist in Warsaw. Dodziuk published a book this year on Poland's largest and most famous Jewish festival, the nine-day Festival of Jewish Culture in Krakow, which has been going strong since 1988. "To put it in short," she said, "it is politically correct now to explore the Jewish history of the local communities, to commemorate Jews of a shtetl who perished in Holocaust, to celebrate somehow Jewish culture."

The activities are meant to educate and memorialize, but they coincide with a Jewish presence that is glaringly visible in more negative contexts, too, and this is also part of the paradox.
Anti-Semitic graffiti is shockingly widespread. Spray-painted Stars of David hanging from gallows deface countless walls.

Much of this, however, likely has little to do with actual Jews. The ugly scrawls are the work of soccer fans who may have no idea what Judaism is but have adopted Jewish symbols as pejoratives with which to bash their opponents.

Meanwhile, figurines of Orthodox Jews clutching coins fill souvenir stalls in Warsaw, Krakow and some other cities. The imagery harks back to the stereotype of Jews as greedy moneylenders, but the figurines are marketed today as abstract good-luck talismans.

"When a member of the city council from a Polish town came to visit me in the States not long ago, he brought a present," said Michael Traison, an American Jewish lawyer who has offices in Chicago and Warsaw. "It was a painting of a Jew counting money, with a dollar bill stuck in its back. He obviously had no idea that the image could be offensive."

Trying to make sense out of the disparity is a cottage industry among scholars, educators, policymakers, communal leaders and ordinary citizens.

How do you balance an abstract evocation of Jews and Jewish life with the real thing? And how do you prevent stereotypes and skewed templates from dominating discourse?

Traison believes a sort of "public display of Judaism" can be useful.

Toward that end, over the past four years he has helped organize Shabbatons that have brought actual Jews and Jewish practice to half a dozen provincial towns where few or no Jews have lived since the Holocaust. Religious services are held in long-disused synagogues, and local officials and ordinary citizens are invited to join in for prayers, kosher meals and Shabbat study.

Traison says he has four main goals: remembrance; demonstrating that the Jewish people -- and Judaism -- are still alive; outreach to Poles; and enabling Jews and local Catholics to participate in a Jewish religious experience.

"This is all very important for young people in Poland, who often only know Jews through imagery and mythology," he said.

Stanislaw Krajewski, a Warsaw Jew who has attended several of the Shabbatons, agreed. "It doesn't just show pictures but is doing something that is really alive," he said. "It is such an innovation -- a way of bringing a sort of circulation of blood in these places."

A Catholic man who attended last year's Shabbaton in Kielce put it this way: "I could feel myself what I already knew theoretically, namely what the Shabbat means for Jews who treat their faith seriously.”
The song “Boi Kala” – “Come, Sabbath Queen” – “is also a challenge or a question on how I, a Christian man, treat my 'shabbat’ -- Sunday," the man said. "Thanks to Jews' testimony of how they treat their holy day, I treat my one more seriously."

Most of these elements were evident at the latest Shabbaton, which took place this summer in Piotrkow Trybunalski, a rundown industrial town in central Poland where city walls are scarred by anti-Semitic soccer graffiti but also bear commemorative plaques recalling the town's rich Jewish past.

The Shabbaton coincided with a city-sponsored Days of Judaism festival, and posters advertised the religious events along with lectures, exhibits and a klezmer concert. Piotrkow's mayor and other officials took part in a Holocaust commemoration ceremony, a kosher Shabbat dinner and an open-air Havdalah celebration in a public park near the center of town.

Schoolchildren staged a play based on a Holocaust story, and Poland's chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, led services in Piotrkow's former synagogue, which was defiled by the Nazis and then turned into the public library in the 1960s.

Most of the participants were Piotrkow Holocaust survivors and descendants from Israel, the United States and other countries. They included the former Israeli diplomat Naftali Lau-Lavie, who was called to the Torah that Shabbat to celebrate the 71st anniversary of his bar mitzvah. Lavie's father was Piotrkow's last chief rabbi, and his brother is Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, a former Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel and now the chief rabbi of Tel Aviv.

Many in the group had visited Piotrkow before. Some had sponsored commemorative projects such as placing plaques and cleaning up the Jewish cemetery. They came to honor the dead, relive memories and make a positive statement simply by walking the streets.

It was "surreal" to pray where both "fame and infamy reigned," said Irving Gomolin, a survivors' son from Mineola, N.Y., who was making his third trip to Piotrkow. But, he added, "It also helps send the message to the town that we have not forgotten, that the Jewish nation and Piotrkower Jews survive and remember and do not want to forget or have their past in this place forgotten."

Read story at JTA.org

Budapest -- Progressive Jewish Music Scene

2010-07-23T01:05:00.000-07:00

My latest JTA piece explores the progressive Jewish music scene in Budapest, ahead of the Bankito Festival in August. I have blogged about some of these people in the past on my Jewish Heritage blog.

Jewish fusion music key to Budapest’s ‘Jewstock’ festival

By Ruth Ellen Gruber · July 22, 2010

BUDAPEST (JTA) -- Flora Polnauer, 28, tilts back her head, half closes her eyes and hums a few bars of a song by her hip-hop/funk/reggae band HaGesher.
The song is "Lecha Dodi," the Shabbat evening prayer -- sounded over a Yiddishized version of the Beatles song "Girl." It's just one of the many unconventional songs of the band, whose vocalists rap their own lyrics in Hebrew, Hungarian and English.

"It's modern Jewish music because it's influenced by Jewish things, but it's not the replaying of old Jewish songs," says Daniel Kardos, 34, a composer and guitarist who plays with Hagesher and several other bands. "I pick up many things and mix them."

Hagesher is one of about half a dozen bands in this city of European Jewish cool blending jazz, hip hop, rap and reggae with Israeli pop and traditional Jewish folk tunes and liturgy to form an eclectic urban sound.
"It's a big mix of contemporary Jewish musical identity," said vocalist Adam Schoenberger, the son of a rabbi. "All of us find Jewish culture very important. Hagesher is a platform for us to articulate musically our different musical interpretation of Jewish cultural heritage."

As the program director of the popular Siraly club, whose dimly lit basement stage is a regular venue for Hagesher and other groups, Schoenberger, 30, is a leader in Budapest's Jewish youth scene. He is also one of the organizers of Bankito, sometimes referred to as "Jewstock" -- a youth-oriented Jewish culture festival Aug. 5-8 on the shore of Bank Lake, north of Budapest.

Bankito includes concerts, exhibitions, performances, workshops, seminars and lectures, a poetry slam, sports events, movies, and Jewish and interfaith religious observances. A number of events at this year's festival will highlight Roma, or Gypsy culture, and focus also on social and civic issues such as the rights of the Roma and other ethnic minorities.

Music is a highlight of Bankito. Hagesher, the Daniel Kardos Quartet and other Jewish bands such as Nigun and Triton Electric Oktopus will perform. "We're at a fascinating moment in Jewish music: It's hip again," said Michigan's Jack Zaientz, who authors the Teruah Jewish music blog. "There's an amazing gang of musicians who are young, smart, urban and Jewish, and making their Jewish identities a core part of their music and stage identities."

The Budapest musicians take their cues from Jewish bands in North America, Paris, London and elsewhere that also experiment with new forms and fusions. Among their models are John Zorn, the avant-garde composer who has promoted "Radical Jewish Culture" on his Tzadik label since 1995, DJ Socalled and Balkan Beat Box, and Orthodox reggae star Matisyahu and rapper Y-Love.

Trumpeter Frank London, who regularly tours Europe with the Klezmatics and other bands, has had a particularly strong impact with his mash-ups of klezmer, Balkan brass and even Gospel.
"Everyone is influenced by Frank London through the Klezmatics," said Bob Cohen, a Hungarian-American musician and writer who has lived in Budapest since the 1980s. "But another big influence in Hungary is Israeli raves on Tel Aviv beaches."

"I played at Jewstock a couple of years ago," Cohen said. "People there had an academic interest in klezmer, but what they want is to go out and rave."
In some ways, Cohen said, the new Jewish music scene in Budapest developed as a reaction to a more traditional klezmer music scene that many young people now perceive as part of the stuffy mainstream establishment. The Budapest Klezmer Band, for example, the city's best-known Jewish music group, performs internationally in opera houses and concert halls as well as theaters and mainstream festivals. Formed in 1990, the band also collaborates on elaborate klezmer stage productions and ballets.

"The new Jewish music scene is a party scene, not a concert scene, and the older generation doesn't relate to it," Cohen said. "In a way, they want an art form that won't be understood by the traditional Jewish establishment."
In many ways, Kardos exemplifies both the musical variety and the variety of influences that help shape the scene.

In addition to Hagesher and his own quartet, he composes film music and plays with several other bands. One of them, Shkayach, is a collaboration with Polnauer, a rabbi's daughter and powerful vocalist who raps with Hagesher and other groups. Shkayach forms a contrast with their rap and progressive jazz work by creating an intimate acoustic sound based on traditional Yiddish and Israeli melodies.
Kardos attended a Jewish high school in Budapest and made aliyah after graduation. In Israel, he learned Hebrew and studied jazz at the Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem. But like many young Hungarian Jews who moved to Israel in the 1990s, he decided after three years to return to Hungary, where he continued his studies.

It was only back in Budapest, Kardos said, that he realized the importance to him of both Jewish music and his own Jewish identity. "It was strange because when I was in Israel, I wasn't open so much to the Jewish musical traditions," he said. Away from Israel, though, Kardos said that "I realized that it was more important than I thought. I was very young when I was in Israel, and I didn't realize that it's very important to be Jewish and have all these traditions."

He added, "I think I was too young for the music, too. After some time I realized that when I hear those Eastern melodies, I just feel like home. It's so natural to me. Like being in a swimming pool and floating.

Read story at JTA.org

Conference on Shirley Moskowitz's art in Calabria

2010-07-19T05:53:00.000-07:00

I'll be going to Calabria in a couple of weeks, with my dad and my brother Sam, for a conference on the art work my mother did in the small village of Nocara in the 1970s and 80s.

Here's a cross post from the shirleymoskowitz.wordpress.com web site --

Arch in Nocara, 1982. Intaglio

A conference on the art work that Shirley Moskowitz did in the 1970s and early 1980s in the small town of Nocara, in Calabria, will be held in Nocara on August 4 — which would be Shirley’s 90th birthday. It is being organized by the Mayor of Nocara and the local authorities.
I don’t have all the details yet, but it will be a one-day event, that afternoon/evening, with a speaker from the University of Cosenza.
Shirley spent several periods of time painting in Nocara, while her husband, Jake, was there carrying out ethnographic work.

She mainly did drawings and water color townscapes as well as a series of portraits of local people.

Some of these works, as well as the photographs she took, formed the basis of later prints and major collages, such as Processione (1987/88), based on a procession of the Madonna she had photographed.

Wedding Procession (Nocara), 1988

An exhibition of Shirley’s work from Nocara was held in the village in the early 1980s. Some years ago, she donated many of the art works she had created there to the town, where they are displayed in the local museum.

Centropa -- Travel Column on Vienna

2010-07-16T09:34:00.000-07:00

Here's my centropa.org travel column on Vienna.

Vienna

by Ruth Ellen Gruber

Vienna looms large in Jewish history and memory.

The imperial Habsburg capital was the vibrant hub of a vast, multi-national Empire that stretched across Europe and encompassed a colorful and sometimes contentious mix of peoples, languages, religions and local cultures.

Jews lived here for centuries. Surviving pendulum-swing periods of tragedy and triumph, prosperity and persecution, they made key contributions to the cultural, economic and intellectual development of the city.
Nineteenth and early 20th century Vienna in particular was home to some of Europe's most influential artists, authors, musicians and thinkers -- from the writers Joseph Roth, Arthur Schnitzler and Stephan Zweig, to the composers Arnold Schoenberg and Gustav Mahler, to the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Vienna was also the cradle of some of the icons of popular culture: the filmmaker Billy Wilder grew up in the city, and the novelist Vicki Baum, the author of Grand Hotel and other best-sellers, was born here and wrote about her Viennese childhood in her memoirs. "To be a Jew is a destiny," she once said.

The Holocaust swept this world away. But monuments, museums and other vestiges of this long and creative Jewish presence can be found in many parts of the city. What's more, Vienna is home, now, too, to a new flowering of Jewish life and creativity, both religious and secular. Vibrant schools, synagogues and other Jewish centers bear living witness to a remarkable Jewish rebirth in the decades since the Shoah. And Jewish writers, artists, musicians and filmmakers are putting their stamp on contemporary culture.

Visitors to Vienna can get a taste of both worlds. Most Jewish historical sites and monuments, as well as most active synagogues and Jewish centers, are located in central parts of the city, embedded in a historic urban setting that conjures up the grandeur of the past amid the contemporary bustle of modern-day life.
The following itinerary highlights some of the most important (and most easily visited) Jewish sights, but still, alas, gives only a brief taste of the richness of Jewish experience in the city.

The Jewish Museum

Vienna's Jewish Museum is a good place to start for both an overview of the city's Jewish history and a taste of today's Jewish cultural offerings. The Museum's main location opened in 1993 in the Palais Eskeles, a downtown mansion at Dorotheergasse 11, in the heart of Vienna's First District. Its unusual exhibition arrangement offers a unique view of Jewish history and memory.

On the ground floor there a display of Judaica objects from a noted collection is paired with an artistic installation reflecting Viennese Jewish history by the American artist Nancy Spero. Upstairs, there is another display of Judaica -- in what is called the "Viewable Storage Area." Here, massed together on shelves, are hundreds and hundreds of ritual and every day objects, many of them salvaged from destroyed households, synagogues and prayer rooms. Some of the silver objects are charred and smoke-stained from the fires of Kristallnacht. The intent of showing the objects this way is to underscore the pride and prosperity of the Jewish community, as well as the extent of the destruction.

The permanent historical exhibition is something quite different. It comprises no physical objects at all. Instead, it consists of 21 holograms, arranged in a bare room. Each is a sort of holographic still life that represents a specific stage, facet or theme associated with Austrian Jewish history and the relationship between Jews and Austrian society. These themes include "Houses of God," "Zionism," "Anti-Semitism," "Loyalty and Patriotism," "From Historism to Modernism," "Shoah," "Vienna Today Š", "Banishments" and "Fin de Siecle."
Key components of the museum are also a comfortable cafe -- reminis cent of the coffee houses where Jewish writers, intellectuals and luftmenschen alike once passed long hours -- and a well-stocked bookstore featuring hundreds of titles of Jewish interest or by Jewish authors on a wide range of topics.

The Jewish Museum also has a branch at Judenplatz, the heart of Vienna's medieval Jewish quarter, which forms part of a complex inaugurated in 2000 that also includes a Holocaust memorial commemorating the 65,000 Austrian Jews killed in the Shoah and a Holocaust documentation center.

Vienna's flourishing medieval Jewish community was snuffed out in 1420/21 by persecutions that culminated in expulsions, murders and the torching of the synagogue on Judenplatz, with Jews inside. A 15th century plaque in Latin on the house at Judenplatz 2 still celebrates this, reading, in part: "Thus arose in 1421 the flames of hatred throughout the city and expiated the horrible crimes of the Hebrew dogs."
The underground remains of the synagogue were discovered during excavations in the 1990s and these now form the core of the Judenplatz Jewish museum, along with a multi-media exhibit about Medieval Jewish life.
Above, at ground level, stands the Holocaust Monument, a massive cube of reinforced concrete that dominates the square. Called the Nameless Library, it was designed by the British sculptor Rachel Whiteread and takes the form of an "inside-out" library -- rows of books with their spines facing inwards. Also inscribed are the names of the sites where Austrian Jews were killed.

Not far away, near the Opera House, stands a big Monument against War and Fascism, by the artist Alfred Hrdlicka. Among several big symbolic sculptures it incorporates a bronze sculpture of a bearded Jew on his knees, almost prostrate, covered by barbed wire, forced to scrub the street. And as you walk about parts of the city, keep an eye out for the Stolpersteine, or stumbling blocks -- these are brass cobblestones put down to mark the houses where Jews and others killed by the Nazis once lived, as part of a commemorative project by the artist Gunter Demnig.

What is today Vienna's Second District, across the Danube Canal from the inner city, was long a Jewish neighborhood. Before World War II about 60,000 Jews -- one-third of Vienna's Jewish population -- lived here, and the district was home to so many synagogues, Jewish theaters, schools and other Jewish institutions, that it was dubbed "The Matzo Island." Most of these sites no longer exist, but a number of plaques AND STOLPERSTEINE, OR COMMEMORATIVE STUMBLING BLOCKS, evoke the neighborhood's Jewish history, and new synagogues and other institutions make it a center of Jewish life.

The Main Synagogue

The Stadttempel, Vienna's Main Synagogue, is located on sloping Seitenstettengasse. Designed by the architect Josef Kornhausel, it was built in 1824-26. From the outside, it looks like a plain, anonymous building -- in fact, many synagogues in Europe were hidden behind featureless outer walls. This was either for protection or in compliance with edicts that allowed direct access to the street only for churches. This in act saved the synagogue during Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938; it was not torched for fear that the entire block could go up in flames. All of the other nearly 100 synagogues and Jewish prayer houses in Vienna were either destroyed or severely damaged. What sets the synagogue apart these days are the armed guards outside.
Inside, the a graceful oval sanctuary is encircled by two tiers of women's galleries and topped by a sky-blue domed ceiling sprinkled with gilded stars. A gilded sunburst surmounts tablets of the Ten Commandments above the ark. At Jewish holidays, every seat is full, and the building complex also houses the Jewish communal offices and archives.

Cemeteries and other sights

What is today Vienna's Second District, across the Danube Canal from the inner city, was long a Jewish neighborhood. Before World War II about 60,000 Jews -- one-third of Vienna's Jewish population -- lived here, and the district was home to so many synagogues, Jewish theaters, schools and other Jewish institutions, that it was dubbed "The Matzo Island." Most of these sites no longer exist, but a number of plaques evoke the neighborhood's Jewish history, and new synagogues and other institutions make it a center of Jewish life.
Vienna has several Jewish cemeteries that are worth exploring, both for their historical importance and for the artistic beauty of the tombs.

The vast Zentralfriedhof or Central Cemetery, at Simmeringer Hauptstrasse 234 in the 11th district, was consecrated in the 1870s and has an extensive Jewish section where about 100,000 people are buried. There are many stately tombs and mausolea, testifying to the prosperity of the community.

One of the easiest cemeteries to visit -- and also one of the most fascinating -- is the Rossau cemetery, the oldest preserved Jewish cemetery in Vienna. It is entered by walking straight through the lobby of a modern municipal old age home at Seegasse 9, in Vienna's 9th district, a five minute walk from the Rossauerlaende U-Bahn stop. (It may seem a cruel juxtaposition to enter a cemetery through an old-age home, but from 1698 to 1934 this was the site of a Jewish hospital.)

The Rossau cemetery is believed to have been founded in 1540 -- the oldest legible stone dates from 1582 -- and it operated until 1783, when the Emperor Joseph II issued a decree banning burials inside what today is the "Gurtel" ring around inner Vienna. Many 17th and 18th century luminaries were buried here, including the financiers Samuel Oppenheimer and Samson Wertheimer.

According to the useful guidebook Jewish Vienna published in 2004 by Mandelbaum Verlag, some of the few local Jews still living in Vienna in 1943 managed to rescue some of the tombstones, either burying them on the spot or transporting them to the Central Cemetery and burying them there.
In the mid-1980s, after the discovery of these stones, the cemetery underwent a full restoration -- and the surviving stones were set up in their original places thanks to a map of the cemetery that had been made in 1912. Many of the stones are massive and feature elegant calligraphy, lengthy epitaphs and some vivid carving of Jewish symbols and floral and other decoration, similar to that on tombs in the Jewish cemetery in Mikulov, Czech Republic, and elsewhere in Moravia. Fragments that could not be put together were used to construct a memorial wall, similar to those that exist in other countries at restored cemeteries. Wertheimer's tomb, a white mausoleum with carved end pieces, is the cemetery's most imposing.

The Rossau Cemetery is a short walk from the Sigmund Freud Museum, at Berggasse 19, which occupies the building where Freud lived and worked from 1891 until 1938, when he fled to England to escape the Nazis. The museum includes original furnishings, some of Freud's antiquities collection and library, films and other material that provide insights into his life and work. The museum also houses a collection of contemporary art and a research library.

Centropa -- Travel Column on Prague

2010-07-16T09:22:00.000-07:00

Old-New synagogue. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Here below is my column on Jewish Prague for centropa.org.

I've been writing about Jewish Prague for, yipes, decades....my first experience there dates back to (yipes again) 1966, when I spent the summer in then-Czechoslovakia with my family. My dad had brought a group of students over from the U.S. and was leading the first American archeological dig in CZ since before WW2. They were digging out in Bylany, a village near Kutna Hora, and one of my brothers stayed there and worked with the crew.

In 2007, soon after my mother's death, I took Dad to revisit the site in Bylany -- I reconnected in 1989 with the archeologists we had known in '66 and we remain close.

In 1966, my mother and youngest brother and I stayed in Prague. Sam and I wandered around the city, visiting the tourist sites and just soaking in the atmosphere, and it is this experience that gave me my deep interest and connection with eastern and central Europe. It was then, indeed, that I had my first contact with Europe's "imaginary wild west" -- when Sam and I attended a 10 a.m. showing in the Kino Sevastopol of Old Shatterhand, one of the movies based on the Karl May characters. I fell in love (like many girls in central Europe at the time) with Pierre Brice, the French actor who played the Apache chieftain Winnetou... I bought postcards of him and also cut out his picture from magazines. I also got a crush on the singer Waldemar Matuska, who performed, among other things, American folk songs in Czech and starred in a Czech language production of Rose-marie (he played the Mountie, the role playedin the movie by Nelson Eddy, my mother's childhood fave). Matuska, who died last year -- and whom I met at a Czech country festival in 2004 --also had a role in the great Czech Western spoof Lemonade Joe.

While in Prague we visited at least some of the Jewish sites -- and my mother, the artist Shirley Moskowitz, painted a wonderful picture (later developed into a print) of the Old Jewish Cemetery.

Here's the centropa article. It picks up on the idea of Jewish Prague as a series of concentric circles that I wrote about at length in my 1994 book Upon the Doorposts of Thy House: Jewish Life in East-Central Europe, Yesterday and Today.

Prague
by Ruth Ellen Gruber
PRAGUE -- Lying between the Vltava River and the Old Town Square, Prague's medieval "Jewish Town," Josefov, is one of the most popular attractions in a magical "golden city" that draws millions of tourists a year. Here, amid historic synagogues, the Old Jewish Cemetery, the Jewish Town Hall and other major sights, is the Ground Zero of Jewish Prague: the stomping ground for heroes and villains and the evocative background setting for a host of old legends, not to mention the cradle of present-day Jewish life. Here, Jewish heritage and legacy are cultivated and exploited as an integral part of the ancient city. At peak season, tourists swarm through the district, making it sometimes difficult to navigate the cobbled streets, and souvenir hawkers sell everything from miniature golems to embroidered kippot.
I imagine the Jewish presence in Prague as a series of concentric circles centered on this medieval ghetto area and then expanding outward, like widening ripples of water, to the edge of the city and beyond. Physical sites, as well as Jewish memory and contemporary Jewish life, are concentrated in the innermost circle: there are a Jewish education center, kosher facilities and Jewish communal offices, and regular services take place in several venues. But there are many places of Jewish interest well away from the city center, too. These are much less visible and well off the beaten track of most visitors to the city, but they, too, form an integral part of the Jewish experience in Prague. The following itinerary will let you sample some of these outer circles of Jewish history and culture as well as the city's inner core.
The Inner Circle
Tourists aside, Prague's old Jewish quarter today bears very little resemblance to the dense welter of narrow alleys, tiny squares, dark passageways and crowded courtyards where generations of Jews were compelled to live from the Middle Ages to the mid-19th century, when the Habsburg monarchs granted them civil rights. After emancipation, many Jews moved out, and Jewish Town became a slum. An urban renewal project in the late 19th century swept away almost everything but a handful of synagogues and a few other historic sites, and the medieval ghetto was replaced by the handsome complex of buildings we see today. On the façade of the building at Maiselova 12, across from the Old-New Synagogue, you can see Jews symbolized by the star of David, money and stereotype profiles.
Jewish Town is still, though, where the city's main Jewish sights are concentrated. And if you can brave the crowds, you will see some of the finest and best preserved and presented Jewish heritage sites in Europe.
These include the 13th-century Old-New (or Alt-neu) Synagogue, the oldest synagogue in Europe still in use. Built about 1270, the compact Gothic building has a high peaked roof and distinctive brick gables. The twin-naved sanctuary features soaring Gothic vaulting and a central bimah enclosed by a late Gothic iron grille. Carvings of grape vines surround the Ark.
Across narrow Cervena alley is the High Synagogue, built in 1568, which, like the Old-New Synagogue, is today an active house of prayer and study. Right next door to the High Synagogue is the Jewish Town Hall (entrance at Maiselova 18), which still serves as the headquarters for Jewish community offices and activities. Built in the 1560s, the Jewish Town Hall is one of the landmarks of the Jewish quarter, with a distinctive tower and big clock with Hebrew letters, that seems to run backwards.
Prague's Jewish Museum occupies several historic synagogue buildings in the district. The museum was originally founded in 1906 to preserve items from the synagogues that were demolished in the urban renewal clearance of the old ghetto. Most of its collections, however, come from the more than 150 provincial Jewish communities in Bohemia and Moravia that were destroyed by the Nazis. The Nazis brought the loot to Prague, and even during World War II used the empty synagogues to exhibit precious relics of the people they sought to annihilate. The museum was run by the communist state after World War II, but it was returned to Jewish administration in 1994.

Today, the collections are displayed thematically in some of the historic synagogues, and these synagogues themselves form key components of the museum complex.
The Maisel Synagogue (Maiselova 10), originally built in 1590, houses an exhibition on Czech Jewish history from medieval times until the end of the 18th century. Among its displays are stunning silver ritual objects. The Spanish synagogue (entrance from Vezenska street), was built in elaborate Moorish style in 1868 on the site where Prague's oldest synagogue once stood. It houses the second part of the Jewish Museum's historical exhibition, detailing the Jewish experience in Prague from the late 18th century to the present. Next door, the Robert Guttman Gallery hosts temporary exhibitions, mainly of contemporary art. The Museum's "Jewish Customs and Traditions" exhibition is housed in the Baroque Klausen synagogue (U Stareho Hrbitova 1), built in the late 17th century. The Pinkas Synagogue (Siroka 3), built in 1535 as a private prayer house for the wealthy Horowitz family, is a memorial to the Jews from Bohemia and Moravia who were killed in the Holocaust. The names and dates of birth and death of all 77,297 victims are inscribed on the walls of the sanctuary. Its upper floor houses an exhibit of materials from the Holocaust period, in particular from the Terezin ghetto, including drawings and poems by the children there.
The unforgettable Old Jewish Cemetery (entrance from the Pinkas synagogue courtyard) is also part of the Museum. Here, some 12,000 tombstones crowd together in bristling clusters, tilted crazily and sunk into the earth. Founded at the beginning of the 15th century, the cemetery was in use until 1787: Lack of space caused graves to be placed on top of each other, and the cemetery's unique appearance has inspired artists and poets for centuries. The oldest identified gravestone is that of Avigdor Kara, from 1439. The Old Cemetery's Ceremonial Hall (U Stareho Hrbitova 3), built in 1911-1912, houses an exhibition on Jewish funeral practices.

Many famous Prague Jews are buried in the Old Jewish Cemetery, including the 16th-century financier Mordechai Maisel and the legendary Rabbi Judah ben Bezalel (c. 1525-1609), a scholar and educator known as the Maharal ("most venerated teacher and rabbi"). Rabbi Loew's tomb is a place of pilgrimage, where pious Jews and tourists alike leave prayers and supplications written on slips of paper.

Many legends grew up around Rabbi Loew over the centuries -- the most famous has it that he created the Golem -- an artificial man made of clay and magically brought to life to protect the Jews. The Rabbi and the legends about him became so deeply rooted in Prague folk culture that a statue of him was included as part of the decoration of the New Town Hall that was built in 1910.

The author Franz Kafka (1883-1924) is also intimately connected with Prague's Jewish Town. He was born on the edge of the Jewish quarter and spent much of his life in and around the district. There is an extensive Franz Kafka Museum at the Hergetova Cihelna, on the Malá Strana bank of the Vltava, as well as a small exhibit at U Radnice 5 (or, Franz Kafka Square), near the Old Town Square, on the site where Kafka was born. A bust of the author stares out from the street corner there, and, not far away, a monument to Kafka stands next to the Spanish Synagogue. This is a 12-foot sculpture that shows a tiny figure of Kafka perched atop an empty suit of men's clothing that seems to be walking. Kafka himself is buried in Prague's New Jewish Cemetery.
Just outside the Jewish Quarter, one of the sculptures that line the tourist-choked Charles Bridge across the Vltava River is a big figure of the crucified Jesus with gold letters spelling out the Hebrew words Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh Adonai Tzvaot (Holy, Holy, Holy Is the Lord of Hosts) affixed above it. In the 17th century, the Jewish community was forced to pay for these words to be placed on the cross as punishment for the alleged desecration of the crucifix by a Jew.
Outer Circles
The lavishly ornate Jubilee Synagogue, located at Jeruzalemska street 7 near Wenceslas Square, was designed by the prolific architect Wilhelm Stiassny and built to replace three synagogues destroyed in the clearance of the old ghetto. It is still used for services. Formally called the Emperor Franz Joseph Jubilee synagogue, it was named in honor of the Habsburg ruler and officially dedicated in 1908 -- the 60th anniversary of his reign. Franz Joseph was a respected, even beloved, figure among Jews -- it was during his reign that Jews were granted full emancipation -- and even today there is a portrait of him hanging in the function room of the Jewish Town Hall. The Jubilee Synagogue incorporates Moorish, Byzantine and art nouveau elements, with a striped façade, towers, arches and a rose window incorporating a star of David.
Several other synagogues still stand in Prague, too. Among them is the stark-looking synagogue in the Smichov district, at the corner of Plzenska and Stroupeznickeho streets, which was built in 1863 and totally remodeled in the Functionalist style in 1931. It now serves as the archive of the Jewish Museum. The neo-Romanesque Liben Synagogue, at the Palmovka metro station, was built in 1860 to replace an earlier synagogue, built in the 16th century. After World War II it was used as a warehouse, but it was restored in the 1990s and now serves as a venue for cultural events. In the outlying suburb of Michle, the synagogue (on u Michelskeho Mlyna street) now serves as a church.

There are several Jewish cemeteries in outer parts of Prague. Two of them are particularly significant and easily visited.
The New Jewish Cemetery, located at the Zelivskeho metro stop in eastern Prague, was founded in 1890 next to the city's main Olsany cemetery complex, and is still in use. The wealth and importance of the Jewish community in the late 19th and early 20th century can be seen in the ornate ceremonial hall and the many imposing family tombs and other monuments. A white, crystal-shaped stone marks Franz Kafka's grave, and a plaque there commemorates Kafka's three sisters, who were killed in the Holocaust.

The Jewish Cemetery in Zizkov, not far from the New Cemetery, near the Jiri z Podebrad metro stop, now forms part of the Jewish Museum. Opened in 1680 as a graveyard for Jewish victims of the plague, it was the main Jewish burial place in Prague between the closure of the Old Cemetery in 1787 and the opening of the New Cemetery. Most of the cemetery was demolished in the 1950s, and a huge, futuristic-looking television tower was erected on the site in the 1980s: a number of sculptures of crawling babies were placed on the structure about ten years ago and add to its weirdness. The surviving section of the cemetery is fenced off and is only open limited times during the week, but it can easily be viewed from outside. It includes the imposing tombs of important personalities, including the influential Prague Chief Rabbi Ezekiel Landau (1713-1793).
There is also a walled-off Jewish cemetery in the Liben district, between Na Malem Klinu and Strelnicni streets, as well as an 18th-century Jewish cemetery in Urhineves, an outlying suburb in southeast Prague. Located at the end of Vachkova street, it was cleaned up and restored in the mid-2000s.

Ruthless Cosmopolitan -- Venice

2010-07-16T08:29:00.000-07:00

Venice chief rabbi Elia Richetti texting on his cellphone. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

I was in Venice in late May, and wrote a couple of articles, including a Ruthless Cosmopolitan column about the difficulty in balancing the real, the virtually and the real imaginary in that historic Jewish space.

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN: In Venice, a Jewish disconnect between locals and visitors
By Ruth Ellen Gruber · June 16, 2010

VENICE, Italy (JTA) -- It was a Friday afternoon in the heart of the historic Venice Ghetto, and I was chatting with the city's chief rabbi, Elia Richetti, when his cellphone beeped. "It's a text message from Gam-Gam Goodies, the Chabad-run pastry shop around the corner," said the bespectacled Richetti, whose wispy white beard spills down to his chest.

He read me the message, a reminder that there were still some chocolate, poppy-seed and cream-filled kosher pastries left -- and still time to pick them up before Shabbat. "They really know how to use technology," Richetti said, smiling.

Many of the circles that make up Jewish Venice converged in that moment.

Richetti, who is also the president of the Italian Rabbinical Assembly, was speaking with me in the well-stocked Jewish bookstore and kosher cafe that form part of the Venice Jewish Museum, an institution founded by the Jewish community in 1953 that encompasses several of the ghetto's centuries-old synagogues.
Jews have lived in Venice since the Middle Ages; the old Jewish cemetery on the Venice Lido was founded in the 1300s. Venetian rulers established the ghetto as Europe's first enclosed place of Jewish segregation in 1516 on the site of an old foundry -- or getto, in the Venetian dialect.

The museum draws nearly 70,000 visitors a year, and locals say the annual number of Jewish visitors to Venice far exceeds that. But the Venice Jewish community itself numbers fewer than 450, only a handful of whom live in the ghetto area. Only a few local Jews seek contacts with the tourists, other than as customers in their shops or bodies to make up a minyan.

"There is a paradox here," said Shaul Bassi, who heads the Venice Center for International Jewish Studies, an institution founded last year aimed at fostering intellectual and cultural interaction between Jewish visitors and Jewish Venetians. "The Jewish community as such is eroding, and many are unaffiliated or disaffected," Bassi said. "But at the same time the ghetto has never been so famous. There has never been such a profound interest in the ghetto as a site of memory."

Picking up the slack, as far as foreign tourists go, is Chabad-Lubavitch, which in two decades of activity here has become the most prominent public face of Judaism in Venice. There is a Chabad house and yeshiva on the main ghetto square. In addition to Gam-Gam Goodies, Chabad runs a popular kosher restaurant, Gam-Gam, which provides Shabbat hospitality, including free Friday-night meals for tourists. Sometimes hundreds attend and spill out into the street singing and dancing.

"Join us for candlelighting, join us for dinner," urged Shachar Banin, the American-born wife of Chabad’s Venice director, Ramy Banin, when I stopped in at Gam-Gam Goodies after my meeting with Riccheti. I didn't buy any pastries, but I did get drawn into a lively discussion with four or five visiting American Jews about the role of women in the Torah and in the home. Along with a dozen other visiting women, I lit Shabbat candles that night at Gam-Gam. The next morning I attended services led by Richetti in the centuries-old Spanish synagogue. Only about 15 of the 80-member congregation were locals.

"Chabad understood before anyone else that Jewish Venice is not just a local place but an international one," Bassi said. "They clearly are the 'real' Jewish Venice on the Internet. And paradoxically, they are the most Orthodox -- and the most open."

The relationship between Chabad and the resident Jewish community has been rocky over the years, with local Jews accusing Chabad of trying to usurp the community's position and undermine its activities.

"Before they came, no one here knew what Chabad was," Anna Vera Sullam, a member of the local Jewish community leadership, told me. "Our traditions are very different."

After two decades a truce -- or at least a modus vivendi -- exists, but frictions are still apparent, both in Venice and in cyberspace.

If you Google Jewish Venice, for example, the Chabad website is the first to come up -- and it includes no mention of Richetti, the historic Spanish synagogue where regular services are held or, aside from the museum, any of the other local Jewish institutions.

Likewise, on the local Jewish community's own website, Chabad and its activities are not mentioned; even the notable presence of Gam-Gam is ignored. Only kosher establishments under Richetti's supervision are listed.
Bassi, whose family has lived in Venice for generations, hopes his new center can foster a concept of Jewish community that will harness the dynamics of centuries of Jewish tradition in Venice with cultural and intellectual input from abroad.

"The future can't rely on the continuation of the Jewish community as such, nor on the presence of tourists," he said. "The only real future community is one made up of Venetian Jews and a rotating community of international Jews who come to live here but also to do something cultural that is internationally viable."
It's far from certain how much impact such a program might have, given the demographic decline of the local community and the overwhelming presence of tourism.

"In theory it's a beautiful idea," said Riccardo Calimani, a Venetian-born novelist and historian who has written widely about the ghetto and Venetian Jewry. "But in practice, who knows -- it's a road to take that has not yet been taken."

Read the story at JTA.org here

Krakow, Festival and Schindler's Factory Museum (in IHT/NYtimes web site)

2010-07-16T08:10:00.000-07:00

I was in the Krakow for the Festival of Jewish culture, where I go every year -- the best party I know, with dozens and dozens of friends among the musicians, artists, teachers, talkers and fans who attend. I have a game: see how far I can walk without running in to someone I know, sitting down, drinking something (coffee, beer, vodka, even water....) This year, I also gave talks to a couple of visiting groups -- one from the Taube Foundation and one from GTU, the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.

This festival was the 20th edition of the event -- I have attended most of them.

I also was able to visit -- and write about -- the newly opened Schindler's Factory museum. Here's a link to my article that appears in the International Herald Tribune and the New York Times web site

Photos (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Visitors in the Schindler’s office section of the museum. The desk was used by Schindler’s receptionist.

New Museum Tells Krakow's Stories of World War II

By RUTH ELLEN GRUBER (Published: July 15, 2010)

KRAKOW — In the mid-1990s, I took a “Schindler’s List” tour of sites made famous by Steven Spielberg’s Academy Award-winning movie, which recounts how the German businessman Oskar Schindler saved the lives of 1,100 Jews by employing them at his enamelware factory in Krakow during World War II.

In the Schindler’s factory museum, one section of the floor is paved with swastikas that people walk on — symbolically trampling the Nazi symbol underfoot.

A guide wearing acid-green sunglasses led us in the footsteps of both Schindler and Mr. Spielberg, on a route that mixed celluloid and reality, Hollywood and the Holocaust. “This,” he said more than once, “existed in reality AND in the film.”

One of the places that existed in both was Schindler’s former Emalia factory, in a grim industrial area of the city. At the time it still operated, but as an electronic components plant. Some of the scenes from “Schindler’s List” had been shot there, and in the wake of the film’s success the staff had placed a small monument to Schindler in the courtyard.

On June 11, the factory’s sprawling administration building opened as Krakow’s newest museum, an ambitious, multimedia evocation of Krakow’s experience under Nazi occupation from 1939 to 1945. Three years in the making, Schindler’s Museum (4 Lipowa Street, www.mhk.pl) cost €3.7 million, or about $4.7 million.
The new museum uses Schindler’s famous story as a springboard to recount a broader narrative that encompasses oppression and resilience, heroism and deceit.

“The history we see here is a reminder that there is an alternative to inaction, a reminder that when we learn of crimes that cry out against our conscience we cannot stand by in quiet revulsion, hoping the world will fix itself,” said the U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who toured the museum during an official visit to Krakow July 3.

Formally a branch of Krakow’s Historical Museum, Schindler’s Factory is “a museum of the occupation that shows what the wartime experience was like in Krakow and shows the context of all the stories — of Jews in Krakow, of Oskar Schindler, of Cracovians, of the German occupiers,” said Edyta Gawron, a historian who was part of the team that developed the museum concept.
“Such a museum was needed,” she said. “People visit Auschwitz, but they have no idea of what life was like here in Krakow.”

[...]

Read full article here

Hadassah Magazine: Budapest

2010-06-04T02:25:00.000-07:00

This article of mine was published in Hadassah Magazine in December/January.

Ruth Ellen Gruber

From Hadassah magazine, December 2009/January 2010 Vol. 91 No. 3

It is edging toward midnight, and a smoky haze clouds the Sirály café in downtown Budapest’s old Jewish quarter. At wooden tables, young people nurse beers or espressos, while techno-punk music throbs beneath the buzz. A few people sit alone, peering intently at their laptops, taking advantage of the free Wi-Fi service.
It is a typical scene in one of the many crowded, youth-oriented cafés that have cropped up in recent years in this funky, inner-city neighborhood.

But a few things set Sirály apart.
For one, there is a mezuza prominently displayed on its front doorpost. Scattered leaflets advertise a Jewish culture festival, an alternative Jewish theater and a concert by a klezmer-hip-hop-punk band. And upstairs, off a lounge, is an office of Marom Budapest, the youth organization of the Masorti (Conservative) movement.

Hungary has the largest Jewish population of any once-Communist state outside the former Soviet Union, with as many as 90,000 Jews in the capital. Twenty years after the fall of Communism, young Jews in Budapest are staking a claim in their identity in bold new ways that are changing the face of Jewish life in the city. Call it Generation J on the Danube.

The institutions that were the hallmarks of the first decade of the Jewish revival still exist—and in many cases continue to flourish. These include more than a dozen synagogues in the city; three main day schools; the Jewish University; the all-purpose Balint Haz Jewish Community Center, opened in 1994; the Jewish Cultural Association (www.mazsike.hu); and publications such as the independent Szombat monthly.

But a host of other Jewish initiatives, projects and organizations now thrive alongside them.
The range is vast. Its scope reflects a dynamic diversity in a generation that rejects definitions of Jewish identity based on the Holocaust, shtetl nostalgia or conventional religious practice, and increasingly seeks models in the Jewish lifestyles found in New York, Paris or Tel Aviv.

“The Jewish youth scene includes people who come from traditionally self-identified families and people who discovered Judaism after 1989,” said Bob Cohen, a Hungarian-American Jewish musician who has lived in the city since the 1980s and fronts the klezmer band Di Naye Kapelye. “Some spent a few years in Israel, some found that local political anti-Semitism drove them to a Jewish sense of community, some simply think it is cool to have an identity bigger than the one afforded them by the ever narrowing self-definition of ‘Hungarian.’”

Youth-oriented Jewish initiatives run the gamut from small, unaffiliated minyanim that meet in private apartments followed by Friday-night dinners to avant-garde culture festivals. For example, a three-day Bánkitó festival was held at a lake in northern Hungary this past August. It featured jazz, funk, klezmer, hip-hop and fusion concerts by local groups as well as exhibitions, films, lectures and workshops. There are Jewish theaters, such as the Golem Theatre and the Budapest Jewish Theater. And a Moishe House, a combination dorm and community center, opened in the old Jewish quarter in September.

Educational opportunities alone include academic programs at Central European University and Eötvös Loránd University, Torah study groups, Jewish lecture series, student clubs and an annual Limmud gathering that in 2008 drew 300 participants.

“People are still just as much looking for new forms to express their Jewish identity as they were in 1989,” said 33-year-old Bruno Bitter, who runs a Jewish pop cultural blog called Kajmánsziget (http://kajmansziget.tumblr.com). As elsewhere, the Internet is another popular forum for Jewish expression and there are a host of Hungarian blogs and Web sites, such as Jewish Meeting Point (www.jmpoint.hu) or the music site Jew Box (http://jewbox.hu).

Sirály, the Bar Ladino café, also located in the old Jewish quarter, and several other new clubs and eateries have become popular meeting points where young Jews can hang out with peers. Open to all, “they are not Jewish places per se, but I would call them Jewish-friendly,” said 29-year-old Adam Schonberger, who helps run Sirály; he also plays in a klezmer-fusion-hip-hop-punk band called Hagesher (www.myspace.com/hagesher). “[The clubs are] a very good and very healthy environment for Jews to live their Judaism, to be happy they are Jews.”

Unlike the sometimes kitschy Jewish cafés that cater to tourists in Krakow and other East-Central European cities where few Jews live, there is nothing nostalgic about these venues—and often nothing overtly Jewish. The décor of the Szoda café, which is owned by two Budapest-born Jews who lived in Israel for a time, features manga cartoon designs, 1960s retro furniture, an orange color scheme and a basement dance floor.

A number of venues offer Jewish programming. Sirály, for example, is a cross between a pub and cultural center. Managed largely by Marom, it hosts exhibits and other events, including performances in its basement theater (www.siraly.co.hu). The Spinoza coffee house and theater, a few blocks away, also features Jewish-themed events, but mainly targets an older crowd (http://spinozahaz.hu).

Last Hanukka, an eight-day festival at Sirály featured experimental performance groups and music as well as lectures on fried foods and the holiday, a round-table discussion on Jewish identity and a talk on charity by local rabbi Istvan Darvas of the Nagyfuvaros Street synagogue. Café service was halted each evening to chant the blessings and light candles on a menora set up on the bar.

“Having an actual space that reflects a community’s needs helps cement an identity,” said Cohen. Sirály, he quipped, has a winning formula to attract young people: “Jewish punk rock, a bar and hormones.”

In many ways, young Jews in Hungary are trying to answer the same basic questions faced by their parents and older siblings in the years after the Iron Curtain came down: What does “Jewish” mean? How can one be Jewish? What are the prospects for a viable Jewish future?

Thanks to the efforts of organized Jewry and the first generation of outreach programs supported by the Joint Distribution Committee, Chabad, the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation, the Jewish Agency and others, there have been myriad ways to experiment over the years.

“When I was growing up, exploring Jewishness was [part of] a cool new identity,” said 31-year-old Anna Haraszti, a math teacher. Her parents are Jewish, but she grew up with little knowledge of Judaism and only began taking interest in it in her teens.

“Western [Jewish] culture was so attractive,” she said. “There was free stuff, gifts, camps—a group identity, something that our parents just didn’t get. It was a way to rebel….”
Haraszti tried synagogues, a Jewish summer camp and various other organizations. She also tried Chabad, which has had an active presence in the city since the late 1980s, “because,” she explained, “they were willing to teach without asking for enthusiasm and without giving you the depressing ‘We live to remember the Holocaust’ angle.”

Today, she finds her comfort zone by frequenting Sirály and other informal spaces where young Jews gather simply to connect.

Others, however, have embraced religious practice. Some have formed their own congregations or meet with friends in informal prayer and study groups. Many are drawn to two or three established synagogues with sympathetic young rabbis.

“It is not hard to be Jewish in Budapest,” said Adam, a 21-year-old university student who prefers not to disclose his full name. “There are a lot of possibilities here.”

Born little more than a year before the Iron Curtain came down, Adam attended Talmud Torah classes and celebrated his bar mitzva. Like hundreds of other Jewish children, he also spent part of each summer at the JDC/Lauder Foundation Jewish summer camp at Szarvas in southern Hungary, a flagship outreach program that opened in 1990 and is still going strong. It hosts some 2,000 children and teens each summer, about half from Hungary and half from other countries.

Years later, Adam was so moved by a cantor’s singing at his grandfather’s funeral that he decided to become a cantor himself. He now studies Torah with Darvas and is enrolled at the rabbinical seminary that forms part of the community-run Jewish University. There are half a dozen students in his class, he said, two of them taking the cantorial course.

Adam, who attends the Nagyfuvaros synagogue, located in a working-class downtown neighborhood, plans to stay in Budapest and help foster religious education and practice. “It’s important to support Jewish life here,” he said.

Still, many young Jews chafe under the templates for observance and identity laid down by the Jewish establishment and are turned off by communal politics or personalities.
Bitter ran an iconoclastic blog, www. judapest.org, for four years. “I founded Judapest as a form of escapism from Hungarian Jewish life,” he said. “I was inspired by other places and wanted to share the joy of those other realities and experiences.”

Judapest’s antiestablishment attitude toward what it dubbed the “worn-out” Hungarian Jewish mainstream gained it a loyal following, with as many as 3,000 hits a day.

It described itself as “a grass-roots online and offline community” aimed at uncovering “the relevant, the stimulating and the cool in the Hungarian Jewish Experience.” In addition to the blog, it sponsored brunches and other events and published a successful Jewish cookbook, Fuszer es Lelek (Spice and Soul) by Eszter Bodrogi, that combined kashrut with haute cuisine.

Bitter’s decision to shut down Judapest in January 2009 to concentrate on his family and career as a market researcher initially left many followers bereft. But a few months after closing Judapest, Bitter started Kajmánsziget, which he called a “microblog” aimed at posting “fun links, light stories, goofy Jewish videos.” It is not a continuation of Judapest, he said, whose content was heavy on opinion pieces, debates and social and cultural commentary.

“There are many dozens of people claiming that Judapest had changed their lives…,” he said not long after he closed the blog. “I meet people all the time in their thirties who say that this was their first viable, attractive contact with Judaism. People don’t find answers in aliya and do not find answers in Chabad. There are many new organizations, but people are still looking for answers.”
Whether the plethora of nontraditional choices now on the Budapest Jewish menu can provide those answers remains to be seen.

“A lot of people don’t know what is Jewish. They are not interested in learning; they are only interested in self-expression,” said lawyer Agnes Peresztegi, an observant Jew who eight years ago helped organize the Pesti Shul, an independent modern Orthodox congregation.
The past two decades have seen a bewildering host of Jewish initiatives come and go, becoming popular and then fizzling out when resources dried up or leaders lost interest or, as with Bitter and Judapest, simply moved on. New organizations, individuals and initiatives then emerge to fill the gaps, in a process of continuing turnover.

In addition, noted Kata Zsofia Vincze, who has studied both Jewish outreach movements and the contemporary Jewish scene in Hungary, “it is difficult to find permanent support. Most sponsors help project by project, and they expect these institutions to one day become self-maintaining.
“But they will never become self-maintaining,” she added, “because, in Hungary, there is almost no [concept of] supporting my community, in donating time, energy and money for the community.... This has to do with the lack of secure, permanent financial support, but also with constant inner conflicts and jealousies.”

“There are a lot of organizations that deal with entertainment,” said veteran community activist Mircea Cernov. “This and the provision of services for free or at a cheap price answers some needs. At the same time, this has nothing to do with learning, community research and development, the development of young leadership or capacity building for a sustainable community.”

Cernov works with several new outreach and education groups that have joined traditional players like the JDC in supporting new youth initiatives and fostering a deeper sense of identity. These include the Beit Israel Israeli Cultural Institute, Limmud Hungary and Haver Foundation, which promotes interreligious dialogue and teaches both Jews and non-Jews about Jewish culture, heritage, history and religion.
This year, Haver and three other organizations in Budapest—Marom, Jewish Meeting Point and the Jewish studies program at Central European University—were chosen for inclusion in Compass, a new guide on the model of the American Slingshot guide, that singles out 36 of what it calls “Europe’s most vital, innovative, effective and sustainable Jewish organizations and programs.”

Edward Serotta, who directs Centropa (www.centropa.org), a Vienna-based education and research center on Jewish life in central Europe, is optimistic about the future, if only because the sheer number of Jews in Budapest provides a viable critical mass. He sees the ebb and flow of organizations and activities as part of an ongoing process. “In the 21 years I have been involved with this community, I have seen Jewish organizations...rise and fall,” he said. “What makes Budapest so different is that there are so many of them. Two very successful Jewish schools see more than 1,000 Jewish children daily, there’s a plethora of youth-oriented organizations....

“Just as important,” he added, “there are synagogues where, on any given Friday evening, there are upwards of 100 people and the number of congregants under the age of 7 is far greater than those over 70.

“Even if the core of all those who actually attend these schools and events numbers between 5,000 to 10,000,” he said, “that still makes Budapest as active a community as any of its counterparts in the West.”

Back at Sirály, 30-year-old Robert Vajda sips a drink and surveys the busy scene. Bearded and wearing an embroidered kippa, Vajda embodies both the brashness and the complexity of the new era of Jewish choices in the city. He is the director of the Budapest Jewish Theater, a low-budget troupe whose productions often deliberately provoke: Last year, hooded protestors broke up the performance of a pornographic parody of Hungarian high culture.

Vajda is an alumnus of one of the city’s Jewish day schools and attends services at Nagyfuvaros synagogue. It was he who chanted the blessing and lit the candles in Sirály’s bar-top menora at Hanukka.

“Who is a Jew? I am,” he said, smiling. “What is being a Jew? It is what I do.”

Moment Magazine: Scenes from a Krakow Cafe

2010-06-04T02:17:00.000-07:00

This article of mine looking back at 20 years of post-communist Jewish development in Poland moved in Moment Magazine's January-February 2010 issue, but I forgot to post it here.

Ruth Ellen Gruber
January/February 2010


Scenes from a Krakow Cafe Kazimierz, the city's Jewish district, was once a place of tragedy. Now its hip cafe culture tells the story of post-communist Poland's Jewish revival. Story by Ruth Ellen Gruber Photographs by Soliman Lawrence It's a sunny morning in early July, and I'm having breakfast at an outdoor cafe table in Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter of Krakow. I have been sitting at cafes in and around Szeroka Street, the main square of Kazimierz, for nearly 20 years, watching the paradoxical Jewish components of post-communist Poland unfold, and Kazimierz itself evolve from a deserted district of decrepit buildings—some with grooves on their doorposts from missing mezuzahs—into one of Europe's premier Jewish tourist attractions, a fashionable boom town of Jewish-style cafes, trendy pubs, kitschy souvenirs and nostalgic shtetl chic. As Poland's historic royal capital, Krakow is one of central Europe's most beautiful cities and was one of the few major Polish metropolises to escape wholesale destruction in World War II. Once Kazimierz was a center of Jewish life and learning, but after the Holocaust only its architectural skeleton remained: Krakow's 64,000 Jews (among three million of pre-war Poland's 3.5 million Jews) perished, but seven synagogues and a score of former prayer houses, stores, homes and cemeteries survived. After the war, under the communists, Kazimierz slid into ruin, and only in the early 1990s did the neighborhood begin to take on new life. Even before Steven Spielberg came here to shoot his 1993 film Schindler's List, set in the wartime Krakow Ghetto and the city's concentration camp, Plaszow, Kazimierz was beginning to rediscover its Jewish soul. Although Krakow is now home to just a few hundred Jews at most (Poland itself has maybe 5,000 to 15,000 out of a population of 40 million), the streets beyond my cafe are crowded with people here for the annual nine-day extravaganza known as the Festival of Jewish Culture. There are Jews from within Poland and from outside: Rabbis, tourists, earnest seekers of family history, writers, filmmakers, bureaucrats, philanthropists, academics, musicians and artists wander the square and surrounding cobbled streets. The vast majority of visitors, however, are non-Jewish Poles who have come to celebrate both the Polish Jewish life that once was and the contemporary Jewish culture that is still very much alive around the world. Some of them have helped bring about the renaissance of Kazimierz and a revival of public interest in Jewish culture throughout the country. Newcomers and regulars, Jews and non-Jews, come together at the cafes that line Szeroka and other streets and squares, turning Kazimierz into a moveable feast of drink, food and conversation that migrates from cafe table to cafe table. I am waiting for Stanislaw and Monika Krajewski, among my oldest friends in Poland, who live in Warsaw and whom I met on the eve of Yom Kippur in 1980. Back then, I was a young American reporter, in Warsaw to cover the birth of Solidarnosc—Solidarity, the anti-communist labor movement that spawned a peaceful revolution and was the harbinger of the collapse of communism. I am not a religious Jew, and I rarely go to services. But in Warsaw, on that erev Yom Kippur, I looked for a shul. The only one to be found of what once were hundreds, was the Nozyk synagogue, built in 1902 and used by the Nazis as a stable. In 1980, the synagogue stood dilapidated and empty. My search took me to a shabby room nearby where paint was peeling from the walls but Jews were gathered for prayers. There was no rabbi: there was not one in Poland at the time. Perhaps three dozen people, almost all men, almost all elderly, stood swaying over well-worn prayerbooks. Among them was a sprinkling of people my own age, and a couple of toddlers running about and making noise. Some of the elderly congregants shushed them—loudly—and I remember thinking, "How can you shut them up? You should encourage them; be happy that there are children here among you." After the prayers, a young married couple came up to me, eager to know who I was and why I was there. "It's simple," I told them, "I'm an American reporter covering Solidarity; I'm Jewish; it's Yom Kippur, so I came to synagogue. It's normal." But "simple" and "normal" had different meanings in their lexicon. They came closer. "Oh, you're a real Jew!" they exclaimed. This put me on the spot. A "real Jew"? After all, I don't speak Hebrew, I don't go to synagogue, I don't keep kosher. "No," they insisted. "You're a real Jew; you've known all your life that you are Jewish. We are just learning. Come back home with us and tell us what to do." That couple was Staszek, as Stanislaw is known, and Monika. They were among the organizers of the "Jewish Flying University," a semi-clandestine study group of Jews and non-Jews in communist Warsaw who met informally to teach themselves what they could about Judaism. This meant the rituals, customs, traditions and history but also the memories and inflections that are often innate in even the most secular of Jews who grew up in freedom. Monika, an artist and teacher, and Staszek, a writer and professor, wend their way around tables through the cafe garden of my hotel, the Klezmer Hois, a rambling, peak-roofed building that used to house a mikvah. We greet each other with hugs. Monika, as usual, wears a flowing skirt and distinctive earrings. A deeply religious man, Staszek is active in interfaith relations and is the Poland consultant for the American Jewish Committee. His books range from commentaries on the Torah to scholarly works on mathematics and logic, his academic field, to essays on Jewish life in contemporary Poland, where every step toward the future can feel weighted down by the memory of the past. The Krajewskis and I catch up on news, and I ask about their sons. Both children celebrated their bar mitzvahs in the Nozyk synagogue, the synagogue that was too dilapidated to be used when we first met but is now fully restored and functioning. The bar mitzvah of their younger son, in 2004, was particularly moving. Daniel, who has Down syndrome, carried the Torah, but instead of giving a speech, he showed pictures he had painted: Jacob's blessing to Joseph's sons; the burning bush; the parting of the sea; the golden calf; the breaking of the tablets. The last picture showed his entire family at the Sabbath table, a scene he has known all his life. Other friends come by and we chat. Then Monika and Staszek are off. Both of them are giving talks or teaching workshops in the festival this year. In a way, the struggle for the soul of Kazimierz can be seen in the differences among the cafes on Szeroka Street. Venues drawing on Krakow's Jewish history were the first to open on the square. But on Szeroka today things are different. There is an Indian restaurant and an Italian one, as well as chic new bars blaring hip hop. Still, critics love to hate Szeroka for its commercial exploitation of Jewish heritage as a saleable commodity and for what some call the "Disneylandization" of Jewish culture and tradition through an emphasis on stereotype and artifice. The Klezmer Hois, where I often stay, is my favorite Jewish-style venue. Located at one end of Szeroka, it has the bygone coziness of an old world family parlor, with doilies and tablecloths covering mismatched tables, chairs and sofas. It was opened by my friends Wojtek and Malgosia Ornat. Though both have Jewish roots, neither was raised Jewish or with any awareness of Jewish family connections: Malgosia, a petite woman with wide eyes and short-cropped blonde hair, was 19 when she learned that her maternal grandmother was Jewish, a story that is not unusual in Poland. Now in their 40s, the Ornats opened the first Jewish-style cafe in Kazimierz, the Ariel, in 1992. Then the only cafe on Szeroka Street, the Ariel was a lonely outpost amid a grimy wasteland of vacant lots and empty buildings. I vividly remember how Wojtek and I, sitting at an umbrella-shaded wicker table, fantasized that some day people would come. And they have. The Ariel touched a nerve that somehow connected commerce with commemoration and spearheaded the creation of a Jewish-style cafe culture which by now has spread far beyond Krakow. As the first to evoke (and capitalize on) a literary image of a lost Jewish world in their cafe decor, the Ornats' visual and atmospheric take on what is "Jewish" has been important in shaping the experience and expectations of locals and tourists, Jews and non-Jews. Like a sepia-tinted memory, "Jewish" is now a brand that symbolizes a time and place that is bygone but fondly remembered. This idea plays on nostalgia but also on the imagination: It represents what some people wish the Jewish world was really once like. Today, half a dozen venues on Szeroka Street present a Jewish theme or make reference to Kazimierz's Jewish heritage, in their name or signs, which are sometimes written in Hebrew-style letters, or in their menus, which feature foods like gefilte fish. There's the Ester hotel and the Noah's Ark restaurant. The Crocodile Street Cafe is named for a short story by the writer Bruno Schulz, who was killed in the Holocaust. The Rubinstein hotel reflects the fact that the cosmetics queen, Helena Rubinstein, was born here. The exterior of the Once Upon a Time in Kazimierz restaurant is mocked up to look like a row of pre-war shops, with weathered-looking signs fronting the street announcing Benjamin Holcer's carpentry shop and Chajim Cohen's general store. One reason I like Klezmer Hois is that it is low key. There is klezmer music but no kitschy curios for sale or on display, no garish commercial exploitation of a neighborhood whose Jewish population was murdered. Instead, the Ornats use the profits from the Klezmer Hois to run a Jewish publishing house, Austeria, which issues books by Polish and foreign authors. They also run a Jewish bookstore on the ground floor of one of the old Kazimierz synagogues, now used for Jewish art exhibits. Klezmer Hois is a sharp contrast to the Ariel, which still operates on Szeroka—much expanded and under different management. With dramatic signage depicting big plaster lions flanking a giant menorah, the Ariel is the most conspicuous landmark on the square, aside from the gothic Old Synagogue, which is now a Jewish museum. Catering largely to tour groups, it sells an off-the-shelf, cookie-cutter "Jewish" experience the way a sushi bar sells Japan or a folk-style restaurant uses hokey traditional music to sell ethnicity. Dozens of paintings of rabbis cover the walls: bearded and sad-eyed, with yarmulkes and sidecurls, they read, lay tefillin, pray and count money. There are also refrigerator magnets: Stars of David, menorahs and disembodied Jewish heads, some of them with exaggerated features right out of Nazi caricature. I once asked an Ariel waiter why these were on sale. He shrugged. "They're Jewish," he replied. For many people, tourists and locals alike, Kazimierz became a major destination with the Festival of Jewish Culture, which was founded in 1988, one year before the ouster of communist rule. By 1992 the Festival had already grown so much that some called it a "Jewish Woodstock." Performers over the years have included Theodore Bikel, Shlomo Carlebach, Chava Alberstein and the Klezmatics. One local entertainer who takes part, and whom I often see at the Klezmer Hois, is the Polish Jewish pianist Leopold Kozlowski, now nearing 90, who was the subject of the movie The Last Klezmer. Nowadays, the Festival features more than 200 concerts, lectures, art exhibits, workshops, guided tours, performances, film-showings and street happenings. Most of the events are sold out, and the final concert, called "Shalom on Szeroka," draws upwards of 15,000 people, most of them Catholic Poles. The festival's founders were two non-Jewish intellectuals, Janusz Makuch and Krzysztof Gierat. Like many other young Poles in the waning decades of communism, Makuch and Gierat became fascinated with Jewish history and culture. Delving into the Holocaust and other Jewish topics was a means of both seeking the truth of their country's past and helping inform their own identities. Like members of the Jewish Flying University in Warsaw, they sought to fill in the blanks left by communist-era taboos that prevented an objective public analysis of history itself, including the thousand-year history of Jews in Poland. "It was like a discovery of Atlantis that people lived here and created their own original culture and had such a deep influence on Polish culture," Makuch, who still directs the festival, once told me over coffee at the Klezmer Hois. An intense man with deep eyes, a full, dark beard and a perpetually troubled-looking brow, Makuch peppers his speech with Hebrew and Yiddish words such as "shalom" and "meshuga;" he has been asked more times than he can remember what it means for a non-Jew to run a Jewish festival for an audience mainly composed of other non-Jews. His reply is often to describe himself as a Shabbos goy, keeping alive the torch of Jewish culture. Since 1998, non-Jews like Makuch, who preserve and promote Jewish culture and heritage, are honored each year at an awards ceremony during the Festival, presided over by the Israeli ambassador. So far more than 150 people all over the country have received the award. Some, like Makuch, run Jewish cultural events; others cut the grass and clean up cemeteries, teach classes, rescue tombstones, organize little museums. Some have the support of their communities; others work in isolation or even encounter hostility. Until recently, Jews were largely absent from the enthusiastic crowds who throng Festival events. "Many Jewish people come to Poland, fly into Warsaw, go straight to Auschwitz, then want to get out," the Krakow-born American philanthropist Ted Taube told me once. "But until the war, Poland had the most prolific, culturally diverse, creative Jewish population anywhere, ever. We can't afford to relegate those people to a postscript in history." Although they are still a minority, more and more Jewish fans and tourists have been turning up in recent years, in part because of special tours run by organizations such as the Taube Foundation and the American Jewish Committee. "I love it here," Cantor Benzion Miller, a Bobover Hasid who lives in Borough Park, Brooklyn, tells me. We are ensconced in armchairs in the crowded little lounge of the Hotel Eden, a kosher establishment opened in the 1990s by an American, Allen Haberberg, in a restored 15th century building in the heart of Kazimierz. The Eden has a mezuzah on every door, both a pub and a private mikvah in the basement, free WiFi Internet and an umbrella-shaded outdoor "Garden of Eden." A roly-poly man with a full white beard, Miller has been a fixture of the Festival of Jewish Culture for the past 15 years, both performing and holding workshops on topics ranging from Hasidic chanting to ritual slaughter. Miller was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany where his parents met after World War II. His father, who had lost his first wife and children in the Holocaust, came from Oswiecim—the town nearly 40 miles from Krakow outside of which the Nazis built Auschwitz. Before World War II, Oswiecim was home to about 12,000 people, more than half of them Jews. Miller's grandfather was a hazan, a cantor, there. Miller always participates in a sometimes riotous public Havdalah ceremony, held in the grandiose Tempel Synagogue, the only 19th-century synagogue in Poland to survive the Holocaust intact. Used by the Nazis as a stable and warehouse, it languished in sad repair until the 1990s, when, with funding from the state and sponsorship from the World Monuments Fund, it underwent a full restoration and is now used for concerts as well on religious occasions. It is filled to capacity, mainly with local Poles, for the Festival Havdalah, which features a mix of hazanut, klezmer and tisch singing that has rabbis in streimels and spectators in summer attire dancing together in the aisles. "I see what is going on here as a continuation of what once was; you try to continue," Miller says. Over the past 20 years, most attention has been paid in Krakow to rediscovering the city's "lost" Jewish culture and promoting it to a non-Jewish public, through tourism and entertainment or through various educational institutions such as the Center for Jewish Culture or the Galicia Jewish Museum. But contemporary Jewish life in the city is now also getting a boost. Over tea in the garden of the Eden, I talk with Rabbi Edgar Gluck, who, in black hat and long wispy beard, can often be seen walking Kazimierz streets like a pre-war patriarch. A politically savvy, German-born Orthodox rabbi in his 70s, he divides his time between Brooklyn and Poland. In New York City, he is known as the co-founder of the orthodox Hatzolah Volunteer Ambulance Corps. "I was in the World Trade Center, taking people out, as the building was coming down," he tells me, recalling the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Here he is the Chief Rabbi of Galicia, a symbolic honorific given to him by Krakow's Jewish community, whom he serves on occasion as hazan. He spends much of his time, though, working toward the preservation of Jewish cemeteries and Holocaust mass graves. But Gluck has rabbinic company and lots of it. "In Krakow now," goes one joke, "there are now five rabbisÑfor three Jews and 20 opinions." One rabbi, brought in by Shavei Israel, a Jerusalem-based group that works with "lost Jews" around the world, is the "official" Jewish community rabbi. Then there is a rabbi who runs the Chabad operation and an American female rabbi who operates a small, offshoot Reform group. There's also the new JCC, financed by Britain's World Jewish Relief and the Joint Distribution Committee, which occupies a sleek five-story building on the grounds of the Tempel Synagogue. Like so much else in Krakow's Jewish universe, the initiative for the JCC came from a non-Jewish source—Britain's Prince Charles, who was moved by the plight of the poor and aging Jews of the city during a 2002 visit. Charles returned to Krakow in 2008 for the JCC's inauguration: Wearing a kippah, he helped affix a mezuzah to the door. "Jewish life is more open and safer here than anywhere else I've been in Europe," says Jonathan Ornstein, the director of the JCC. I meet Ornstein, a 39-year-old self-described "atheist Jewish vegetarian" for a cappuccino at a cafe on the hip Plac Nowy, the pre-war Jewish market square whose central building was a kosher poultry slaughterhouse. Plac Nowy, now a booming center of nightlife, is full of music clubs and trendy bars, which Ornstein prefers to the "Jewish-style" cafes on Szeroka. "We have kids from the Sunday school playing in the courtyard with the gate open; we feel no danger, no fear." Born in New York, Ornstein moved to Israel as a young man and relocated to Krakow seven years ago, teaching Hebrew at the Jagiellonian University. The Jagiellonian has a Jewish studies program that was launched in the 1980s; its outgrowth, the Center for Jewish Culture, opened in 1992 in a renovated former prayer house off Plac Nowy. Ornstein rejects nostalgia for the city's past and focuses on stimulating contemporary Jewish expression. The bulletin boards in the JCC's lobby flutter with announcements for clubs and social events: a Hanukkah party this year lasted until dawn, and the JCC's Facebook group boasts more than 360 members. "People talk about Kazimierz as being the "former" Jewish quarter of Krakow. But I say, why former?" says Ornstein. "It is the present Jewish quarter of Krakow. You can't measure it in numbers but in feeling. Jews live freely; people know things about Judaism and Jewish traditions; there's a Jewish studies program at the university; there's the Festival." As he sees it, "Nobody alive today has a memory of Kazimierz when it was better than it is now." Back at the cafe at the Klezmer Hois, I spot my friend Konstanty (Kostek) Gebert. "This is where I hold court," jokes Gebert, an award-winning author and a veteran of the Jewish Flying University. As an underground Solidarity activist, he deliberately chose a Jewish-sounding pen name—Dawid Warszawski—to write in the dissident press. In 1989, Gebert was at the Round Table talks between the communist authorities and Solidarity that facilitated the peaceful ouster of the old regime. He was the founding editor of Midrasz, a Jewish cultural and intellectual monthly, and today he heads the Warsaw-based Taube Center for the Renewal of Jewish Culture in Poland. In addition to Krakow, small active Jewish communities are found in Warsaw, Lodz, Wroclaw and several other Polish cities. I'm far from sure that there is a solid enough critical mass to ensure their long-term survival. Nonetheless, in many senses, to be Jewish here and to accept Jewishness as a positive identity choice now is increasingly normal. Or at least much more normal than it was 10, 20 and certainly 30 years ago. "Today's Jewish children in Poland, whatever else the future holds in store for them, will never grow up knowing, as their parents did, that to be Jewish means to be alone and vulnerable," Gebert wrote in his 2008 memoir Living in the Land of Ashes."Hopes have been successfully built on much more shaky foundations." He was not always this certain. He likes to joke about how, in the mid-1980s, he told a pair of Polish journalists that he didn't think Jews in Poland could survive. The journalists—writer Malgorzata Niezabitowska and photographer Tomasz Tomaszewski—were working on an article for National Geographic that eventually became a book called Remnants: The Last Jews of Poland. They asked Gebert how he saw the future for Jews in the country. "I believe we are the last ones," he replied. "Definitely." Today, he puffs his pipe and straightens his kippah. "Ugh. Never talk to the media!" he says laughing. And Krakow's moveable Jewish feast of drink and food and conversation goes on. Ruth Ellen Gruber has chronicled European Jewish issues for more than 20 years. Her books include National Geographic Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern Europe and Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe. Soliman Lawrence is a Berlin-based photographer who is documenting the renaissance of Jewish Poland.

Scenes from a Krakow Cafe

Kazimierz, the city's Jewish district, was once a place of tragedy. Now its hip cafe culture tells the story of post-communist Poland's Jewish revival.

Story by Ruth Ellen Gruber
Photographs by Soliman Lawrence

It's a sunny morning in early July, and I'm having breakfast at an outdoor cafe table in Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter of Krakow. I have been sitting at cafes in and around Szeroka Street, the main square of Kazimierz, for nearly 20 years, watching the paradoxical Jewish components of post-communist Poland unfold, and Kazimierz itself evolve from a deserted district of decrepit buildings—some with grooves on their doorposts from missing mezuzahs—into one of Europe's premier Jewish tourist attractions, a fashionable boom town of Jewish-style cafes, trendy pubs, kitschy souvenirs and nostalgic shtetl chic.

As Poland's historic royal capital, Krakow is one of central Europe's most beautiful cities and was one of the few major Polish metropolises to escape wholesale destruction in World War II. Once Kazimierz was a center of Jewish life and learning, but after the Holocaust only its architectural skeleton remained: Krakow's 64,000 Jews (among three million of pre-war Poland's 3.5 million Jews) perished, but seven synagogues and a score of former prayer houses, stores, homes and cemeteries survived. After the war, under the communists, Kazimierz slid into ruin, and only in the early 1990s did the neighborhood begin to take on new life. Even before Steven Spielberg came here to shoot his 1993 film Schindler's List, set in the wartime Krakow Ghetto and the city's concentration camp, Plaszow, Kazimierz was beginning to rediscover its Jewish soul.

Although Krakow is now home to just a few hundred Jews at most (Poland itself has maybe 5,000 to 15,000 out of a population of 40 million), the streets beyond my cafe are crowded with people here for the annual nine-day extravaganza known as the Festival of Jewish Culture. There are Jews from within Poland and from outside: Rabbis, tourists, earnest seekers of family history, writers, filmmakers, bureaucrats, philanthropists, academics, musicians and artists wander the square and surrounding cobbled streets. The vast majority of visitors, however, are non-Jewish Poles who have come to celebrate both the Polish Jewish life that once was and the contemporary Jewish culture that is still very much alive around the world. Some of them have helped bring about the renaissance of Kazimierz and a revival of public interest in Jewish culture throughout the country. Newcomers and regulars, Jews and non-Jews, come together at the cafes that line Szeroka and other streets and squares, turning Kazimierz into a moveable feast of drink, food and conversation that migrates from cafe table to cafe table.

I am waiting for Stanislaw and Monika Krajewski, among my oldest friends in Poland, who live in Warsaw and whom I met on the eve of Yom Kippur in 1980. Back then, I was a young American reporter, in Warsaw to cover the birth of Solidarnosc—Solidarity, the anti-communist labor movement that spawned a peaceful revolution and was the harbinger of the collapse of communism. I am not a religious Jew, and I rarely go to services. But in Warsaw, on that erev Yom Kippur, I looked for a shul. The only one to be found of what once were hundreds, was the Nozyk synagogue, built in 1902 and used by the Nazis as a stable.

In 1980, the synagogue stood dilapidated and empty. My search took me to a shabby room nearby where paint was peeling from the walls but Jews were gathered for prayers. There was no rabbi: there was not one in Poland at the time. Perhaps three dozen people, almost all men, almost all elderly, stood swaying over well-worn prayerbooks. Among them was a sprinkling of people my own age, and a couple of toddlers running about and making noise. Some of the elderly congregants shushed them—loudly—and I remember thinking, "How can you shut them up? You should encourage them; be happy that there are children here among you."

After the prayers, a young married couple came up to me, eager to know who I was and why I was there. "It's simple," I told them, "I'm an American reporter covering Solidarity; I'm Jewish; it's Yom Kippur, so I came to synagogue. It's normal." But "simple" and "normal" had different meanings in their lexicon. They came closer. "Oh, you're a real Jew!" they exclaimed. This put me on the spot. A "real Jew"? After all, I don't speak Hebrew, I don't go to synagogue, I don't keep kosher. "No," they insisted. "You're a real Jew; you've known all your life that you are Jewish. We are just learning. Come back home with us and tell us what to do."

That couple was Staszek, as Stanislaw is known, and Monika. They were among the organizers of the "Jewish Flying University," a semi-clandestine study group of Jews and non-Jews in communist Warsaw who met informally to teach themselves what they could about Judaism. This meant the rituals, customs, traditions and history but also the memories and inflections that are often innate in even the most secular of Jews who grew up in freedom.

Monika, an artist and teacher, and Staszek, a writer and professor, wend their way around tables through the cafe garden of my hotel, the Klezmer Hois, a rambling, peak-roofed building that used to house a mikvah. We greet each other with hugs. Monika, as usual, wears a flowing skirt and distinctive earrings. A deeply religious man, Staszek is active in interfaith relations and is the Poland consultant for the American Jewish Committee. His books range from commentaries on the Torah to scholarly works on mathematics and logic, his academic field, to essays on Jewish life in contemporary Poland, where every step toward the future can feel weighted down by the memory of the past.

The Krajewskis and I catch up on news, and I ask about their sons. Both children celebrated their bar mitzvahs in the Nozyk synagogue, the synagogue that was too dilapidated to be used when we first met but is now fully restored and functioning. The bar mitzvah of their younger son, in 2004, was particularly moving. Daniel, who has Down syndrome, carried the Torah, but instead of giving a speech, he showed pictures he had painted: Jacob's blessing to Joseph's sons; the burning bush; the parting of the sea; the golden calf; the breaking of the tablets. The last picture showed his entire family at the Sabbath table, a scene he has known all his life.
Other friends come by and we chat. Then Monika and Staszek are off. Both of them are giving talks or teaching workshops in the festival this year.

In a way, the struggle for the soul of Kazimierz can be seen in the differences among the cafes on Szeroka Street. Venues drawing on Krakow's Jewish history were the first to open on the square. But on Szeroka today things are different. There is an Indian restaurant and an Italian one, as well as chic new bars blaring hip hop. Still, critics love to hate Szeroka for its commercial exploitation of Jewish heritage as a saleable commodity and for what some call the "Disneylandization" of Jewish culture and tradition through an emphasis on stereotype and artifice.

The Klezmer Hois, where I often stay, is my favorite Jewish-style venue. Located at one end of Szeroka, it has the bygone coziness of an old world family parlor, with doilies and tablecloths covering mismatched tables, chairs and sofas. It was opened by my friends Wojtek and Malgosia Ornat. Though both have Jewish roots, neither was raised Jewish or with any awareness of Jewish family connections: Malgosia, a petite woman with wide eyes and short-cropped blonde hair, was 19 when she learned that her maternal grandmother was Jewish, a story that is not unusual in Poland.

Now in their 40s, the Ornats opened the first Jewish-style cafe in Kazimierz, the Ariel, in 1992. Then the only cafe on Szeroka Street, the Ariel was a lonely outpost amid a grimy wasteland of vacant lots and empty buildings. I vividly remember how Wojtek and I, sitting at an umbrella-shaded wicker table, fantasized that some day people would come. And they have. The Ariel touched a nerve that somehow connected commerce with commemoration and spearheaded the creation of a Jewish-style cafe culture which by now has spread far beyond Krakow. As the first to evoke (and capitalize on) a literary image of a lost Jewish world in their cafe decor, the Ornats' visual and atmospheric take on what is "Jewish" has been important in shaping the experience and expectations of locals and tourists, Jews and non-Jews. Like a sepia-tinted memory, "Jewish" is now a brand that symbolizes a time and place that is bygone but fondly remembered. This idea plays on nostalgia but also on the imagination: It represents what some people wish the Jewish world was really once like.

Today, half a dozen venues on Szeroka Street present a Jewish theme or make reference to Kazimierz's Jewish heritage, in their name or signs, which are sometimes written in Hebrew-style letters, or in their menus, which feature foods like gefilte fish. There's the Ester hotel and the Noah's Ark restaurant. The Crocodile Street Cafe is named for a short story by the writer Bruno Schulz, who was killed in the Holocaust. The Rubinstein hotel reflects the fact that the cosmetics queen, Helena Rubinstein, was born here. The exterior of the Once Upon a Time in Kazimierz restaurant is mocked up to look like a row of pre-war shops, with weathered-looking signs fronting the street announcing Benjamin Holcer's carpentry shop and Chajim Cohen's general store.

One reason I like Klezmer Hois is that it is low key. There is klezmer music but no kitschy curios for sale or on display, no garish commercial exploitation of a neighborhood whose Jewish population was murdered. Instead, the Ornats use the profits from the Klezmer Hois to run a Jewish publishing house, Austeria, which issues books by Polish and foreign authors. They also run a Jewish bookstore on the ground floor of one of the old Kazimierz synagogues, now used for Jewish art exhibits.

Klezmer Hois is a sharp contrast to the Ariel, which still operates on Szeroka—much expanded and under different management. With dramatic signage depicting big plaster lions flanking a giant menorah, the Ariel is the most conspicuous landmark on the square, aside from the gothic Old Synagogue, which is now a Jewish museum. Catering largely to tour groups, it sells an off-the-shelf, cookie-cutter "Jewish" experience the way a sushi bar sells Japan or a folk-style restaurant uses hokey traditional music to sell ethnicity. Dozens of paintings of rabbis cover the walls: bearded and sad-eyed, with yarmulkes and sidecurls, they read, lay tefillin, pray and count money. There are also refrigerator magnets: Stars of David, menorahs and disembodied Jewish heads, some of them with exaggerated features right out of Nazi caricature. I once asked an Ariel waiter why these were on sale. He shrugged. "They're Jewish," he replied.

For many people, tourists and locals alike, Kazimierz became a major destination with the Festival of Jewish Culture, which was founded in 1988, one year before the ouster of communist rule. By 1992 the Festival had already grown so much that some called it a "Jewish Woodstock." Performers over the years have included Theodore Bikel, Shlomo Carlebach, Chava Alberstein and the Klezmatics. One local entertainer who takes part, and whom I often see at the Klezmer Hois, is the Polish Jewish pianist Leopold Kozlowski, now nearing 90, who was the subject of the movie The Last Klezmer. Nowadays, the Festival features more than 200 concerts, lectures, art exhibits, workshops, guided tours, performances, film-showings and street happenings. Most of the events are sold out, and the final concert, called "Shalom on Szeroka," draws upwards of 15,000 people, most of them Catholic Poles.

The festival's founders were two non-Jewish intellectuals, Janusz Makuch and Krzysztof Gierat. Like many other young Poles in the waning decades of communism, Makuch and Gierat became fascinated with Jewish history and culture. Delving into the Holocaust and other Jewish topics was a means of both seeking the truth of their country's past and helping inform their own identities. Like members of the Jewish Flying University in Warsaw, they sought to fill in the blanks left by communist-era taboos that prevented an objective public analysis of history itself, including the thousand-year history of Jews in Poland.

"It was like a discovery of Atlantis that people lived here and created their own original culture and had such a deep influence on Polish culture," Makuch, who still directs the festival, once told me over coffee at the Klezmer Hois. An intense man with deep eyes, a full, dark beard and a perpetually troubled-looking brow, Makuch peppers his speech with Hebrew and Yiddish words such as "shalom" and "meshuga;" he has been asked more times than he can remember what it means for a non-Jew to run a Jewish festival for an audience mainly composed of other non-Jews. His reply is often to describe himself as a Shabbos goy, keeping alive the torch of Jewish culture.

Since 1998, non-Jews like Makuch, who preserve and promote Jewish culture and heritage, are honored each year at an awards ceremony during the Festival, presided over by the Israeli ambassador. So far more than 150 people all over the country have received the award. Some, like Makuch, run Jewish cultural events; others cut the grass and clean up cemeteries, teach classes, rescue tombstones, organize little museums. Some have the support of their communities; others work in isolation or even encounter hostility.

Until recently, Jews were largely absent from the enthusiastic crowds who throng Festival events. "Many Jewish people come to Poland, fly into Warsaw, go straight to Auschwitz, then want to get out," the Krakow-born American philanthropist Ted Taube told me once. "But until the war, Poland had the most prolific, culturally diverse, creative Jewish population anywhere, ever. We can't afford to relegate those people to a postscript in history." Although they are still a minority, more and more Jewish fans and tourists have been turning up in recent years, in part because of special tours run by organizations such as the Taube Foundation and the American Jewish Committee.

"I love it here," Cantor Benzion Miller, a Bobover Hasid who lives in Borough Park, Brooklyn, tells me. We are ensconced in armchairs in the crowded little lounge of the Hotel Eden, a kosher establishment opened in the 1990s by an American, Allen Haberberg, in a restored 15th century building in the heart of Kazimierz. The Eden has a mezuzah on every door, both a pub and a private mikvah in the basement, free WiFi Internet and an umbrella-shaded outdoor "Garden of Eden."

A roly-poly man with a full white beard, Miller has been a fixture of the Festival of Jewish Culture for the past 15 years, both performing and holding workshops on topics ranging from Hasidic chanting to ritual slaughter. Miller was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany where his parents met after World War II. His father, who had lost his first wife and children in the Holocaust, came from Oswiecim—the town nearly 40 miles from Krakow outside of which the Nazis built Auschwitz. Before World War II, Oswiecim was home to about 12,000 people, more than half of them Jews. Miller's grandfather was a hazan, a cantor, there.

Miller always participates in a sometimes riotous public Havdalah ceremony, held in the grandiose Tempel Synagogue, the only 19th-century synagogue in Poland to survive the Holocaust intact. Used by the Nazis as a stable and warehouse, it languished in sad repair until the 1990s, when, with funding from the state and sponsorship from the World Monuments Fund, it underwent a full restoration and is now used for concerts as well on religious occasions. It is filled to capacity, mainly with local Poles, for the Festival Havdalah, which features a mix of hazanut, klezmer and tisch singing that has rabbis in streimels and spectators in summer attire dancing together in the aisles. "I see what is going on here as a continuation of what once was; you try to continue," Miller says.

Over the past 20 years, most attention has been paid in Krakow to rediscovering the city's "lost" Jewish culture and promoting it to a non-Jewish public, through tourism and entertainment or through various educational institutions such as the Center for Jewish Culture or the Galicia Jewish Museum. But contemporary Jewish life in the city is now also getting a boost.

Over tea in the garden of the Eden, I talk with Rabbi Edgar Gluck, who, in black hat and long wispy beard, can often be seen walking Kazimierz streets like a pre-war patriarch. A politically savvy, German-born Orthodox rabbi in his 70s, he divides his time between Brooklyn and Poland. In New York City, he is known as the co-founder of the orthodox Hatzolah Volunteer Ambulance Corps. "I was in the World Trade Center, taking people out, as the building was coming down," he tells me, recalling the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Here he is the Chief Rabbi of Galicia, a symbolic honorific given to him by Krakow's Jewish community, whom he serves on occasion as hazan. He spends much of his time, though, working toward the preservation of Jewish cemeteries and Holocaust mass graves. But Gluck has rabbinic company and lots of it. "In Krakow now," goes one joke, "there are now five rabbisÑfor three Jews and 20 opinions." One rabbi, brought in by Shavei Israel, a Jerusalem-based group that works with "lost Jews" around the world, is the "official" Jewish community rabbi. Then there is a rabbi who runs the Chabad operation and an American female rabbi who operates a small, offshoot Reform group.

There's also the new JCC, financed by Britain's World Jewish Relief and the Joint Distribution Committee, which occupies a sleek five-story building on the grounds of the Tempel Synagogue. Like so much else in Krakow's Jewish universe, the initiative for the JCC came from a non-Jewish source—Britain's Prince Charles, who was moved by the plight of the poor and aging Jews of the city during a 2002 visit. Charles returned to Krakow in 2008 for the JCC's inauguration: Wearing a kippah, he helped affix a mezuzah to the door.

"Jewish life is more open and safer here than anywhere else I've been in Europe," says Jonathan Ornstein, the director of the JCC. I meet Ornstein, a 39-year-old self-described "atheist Jewish vegetarian" for a cappuccino at a cafe on the hip Plac Nowy, the pre-war Jewish market square whose central building was a kosher poultry slaughterhouse. Plac Nowy, now a booming center of nightlife, is full of music clubs and trendy bars, which Ornstein prefers to the "Jewish-style" cafes on Szeroka. "We have kids from the Sunday school playing in the courtyard with the gate open; we feel no danger, no fear."

Born in New York, Ornstein moved to Israel as a young man and relocated to Krakow seven years ago, teaching Hebrew at the Jagiellonian University. The Jagiellonian has a Jewish studies program that was launched in the 1980s; its outgrowth, the Center for Jewish Culture, opened in 1992 in a renovated former prayer house off Plac Nowy. Ornstein rejects nostalgia for the city's past and focuses on stimulating contemporary Jewish expression. The bulletin boards in the JCC's lobby flutter with announcements for clubs and social events: a Hanukkah party this year lasted until dawn, and the JCC's Facebook group boasts more than 360 members. "People talk about Kazimierz as being the "former" Jewish quarter of Krakow. But I say, why former?" says Ornstein. "It is the present Jewish quarter of Krakow. You can't measure it in numbers but in feeling. Jews live freely; people know things about Judaism and Jewish traditions; there's a Jewish studies program at the university; there's the Festival." As he sees it, "Nobody alive today has a memory of Kazimierz when it was better than it is now."

Back at the cafe at the Klezmer Hois, I spot my friend Konstanty (Kostek) Gebert. "This is where I hold court," jokes Gebert, an award-winning author and a veteran of the Jewish Flying University. As an underground Solidarity activist, he deliberately chose a Jewish-sounding pen name—Dawid Warszawski—to write in the dissident press. In 1989, Gebert was at the Round Table talks between the communist authorities and Solidarity that facilitated the peaceful ouster of the old regime. He was the founding editor of Midrasz, a Jewish cultural and intellectual monthly, and today he heads the Warsaw-based Taube Center for the Renewal of Jewish Culture in Poland.

In addition to Krakow, small active Jewish communities are found in Warsaw, Lodz, Wroclaw and several other Polish cities. I'm far from sure that there is a solid enough critical mass to ensure their long-term survival. Nonetheless, in many senses, to be Jewish here and to accept Jewishness as a positive identity choice now is increasingly normal. Or at least much more normal than it was 10, 20 and certainly 30 years ago. "Today's Jewish children in Poland, whatever else the future holds in store for them, will never grow up knowing, as their parents did, that to be Jewish means to be alone and vulnerable," Gebert wrote in his 2008 memoir Living in the Land of Ashes."Hopes have been successfully built on much more shaky foundations."

He was not always this certain. He likes to joke about how, in the mid-1980s, he told a pair of Polish journalists that he didn't think Jews in Poland could survive. The journalists—writer Malgorzata Niezabitowska and photographer Tomasz Tomaszewski—were working on an article for National Geographic that eventually became a book called Remnants: The Last Jews of Poland. They asked Gebert how he saw the future for Jews in the country. "I believe we are the last ones," he replied. "Definitely." Today, he puffs his pipe and straightens his kippah. "Ugh. Never talk to the media!" he says laughing. And Krakow's moveable Jewish feast of drink and food and conversation goes on.

Ruth Ellen Gruber has chronicled European Jewish issues for more than 20 years. Her books include National Geographic Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern Europe and Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe.

Soliman Lawrence is a Berlin-based photographer who is documenting the renaissance of Jewish Poland.

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- Poland

2010-04-22T00:20:00.000-07:00

My latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column is about the change in Jewish attitudes toward Poland, as demonstrated by reaction to the plane crash that killed President Lech Kaczynski and dozens of other officials.

Reaction to tragedy showcases changes in Polish-Jewish relations

By Ruth Ellen Gruber · April 20, 2010

ROME (JTA) -- The Jewish reaction to the death of Polish President Lech Kaczynski and dozens of other senior Polish officials in an air tragedy highlights a remarkable change in how the Jewish world views Poland.

The prayers, public statements and personal tributes, including a special remembrance during the March of the Living, were normal expressions of grief and solidarity for a close friend and ally -- in short, heartfelt sentiments that probably could not have been made 20 or even 15 years ago.

Poland looms large in the collective Jewish consciousness. Huge numbers of North American Jews trace their ancestry to Poland, and before World War II Poland was Europe's Jewish heartland. Some 3 million Polish Jews were killed in the Holocaust.

Until fairly recently, however, much of the Jewish world regarded Poland as little more than a vast, anti-Semitic Jewish graveyard. These attitudes were exemplified in 1989 by Israel's then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who famously declared that Poles "suck in" anti-Semitism "with their mother's milk."

Today, however, Poland is one of Israel's best friends, and Jewish leaders hailed Kaczynski and others on the doomed plane for their dedication in helping write a new chapter in Polish-Jewish relations. Kaczynski was buried Sunday.

This change in Jewish attitudes by no means came overnight. It was the fruit of a deliberate, sometime rocky post-communism Polish policy aimed at convincing the Jewish world that Poland -- and Poles -- could be trusted partners.

This included organized outreach, Poland's emergence as an ally of Israel and extensive Polish interaction with international Jewish organizations on both a formal and informal basis. In 1995, the Polish government even established the unprecedented post of roving ambassador to the Jewish Diaspora to foster contacts and provide a conduit for communications.

Meanwhile, lacerating public debates in Poland over anti-Semitism and the Polish role in the Holocaust, sparked by several books and films, also demonstrated to the Jewish world a willingness in Poland to tackle these troubling issues.

"Jewish attitudes became more positive as the world began to recognize Poland as a modern democratic nation rather than the apocryphal place of our ancient sufferings," says Michael Traison, a Jewish American lawyer who has maintained an office in Poland since the mid-1990s. "And attitudes were impacted by the growth of information flowing out of Poland to the Jewish world as people learn that 'Am Yisrael chai' [the Jewish people lives], even in Poland."

Jewish figures themselves played key roles by demonstrating their own openness to Poland and highlighting the revival of contemporary Jewish life in the country.

Shevach Weiss, a Polish-born Holocaust survivor and former speaker of the Israeli Knesset, became a popular and even beloved figure among locals as the Israeli ambassador to Poland from 2000 to 2004.

I'll never forget seeing him plunge into a crowd of 10,000 frenzied fans, most of them Catholic Poles, who crammed into the main square of Krakow's old Jewish quarter, Kazimierz, for the final concert of the annual Festival of Jewish Culture in 2002.

The Krakow Festival and the new Museum of the History of Polish Jewry under construction in Warsaw also have won enthusiastic American supporters. Poland's American-born chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, has been tireless in spreading the word that a small but living Jewish community exists in Poland.

Organizations such as the San Francisco-based Taube Foundation and the American Jewish Committee now make it a point to bring Jewish groups to Poland not just to commemorate the Holocaust but to take part in Jewish cultural events and meet local Jews and Catholic Poles.

"The story of Judaism in Poland did not end with the Holocaust," promotional material for Taube-led tours says.

What all this means is that after decades of looking at Poland through a lens tinged darkly with tragedy and distrust, Jewish leaders increasingly are willing to demonstrate belief that Poland has changed. Or at least is changing.

To be sure, this does not mean that Polish anti-Semitism has vanished; on the contrary. It does recognize, however, that other forces are in play, too.

To someone like me, whose relationship with the Jewish experience in post-Holocaust Poland goes back nearly 30 years, this change of attitude is as dramatic as it is welcome. It remains to be seen, though, how far it has trickled down.

An American Jewish friend here in Italy, who first told me the news about Kaczynski’s death in the plane crash, was surprised when I expressed dismay.

"I don't know anything about him except that he's an anti-Semite,” my friend said.

An Israeli Facebook friend wrote: "I wish that Poles -- who indeed suffered a grievous loss in the plane crash that killed its leadership -- felt the same sense of loss over the 3 million Polish Jews murdered in their country, often at the hands of the Polish people."

Still, I was moved and encouraged by the homage paid to Kaczynski by the 10,000 participants of this year's March of the Living, the annual youth gathering that commemorates Holocaust Remembrance Day with a ceremony at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Back in 1994, when I was the cultural guide for a March of the Living group, the youngsters I was with spent their last evening in Poland acting out anti-Polish skits. Their handbook took for granted that the youngsters would feel nothing positive toward local Poles.

"We will hate them for having participated in atrocities, but we will also pity them for their woeful living conditions today," it read.

But at this year’s March of the Living, young participants wore black armbands to honor Kaczynski and the other crash victims.

"We join our Polish brothers and sisters in their time of sorrow, and express our deepest sympathies for their loss," a statement from the March of the Living said. "Our thoughts, hopes and prayers are with them during this difficult time."

Read column at the jta web site

Tablet Magazine -- Mikvah exhibition in Hohenems

2010-04-22T00:15:00.000-07:00

My latest piece in Tablet Magazine is about the exhibit "Ganz Rein" at the Jewish Museum in Hohenems.

Pure and Complicated An exhibition devoted to mikvahs taps into Austria's troubled past—and complex present

By Ruth Ellen Gruber
April 21, 2010

A new exhibition on Jewish ritual baths at the Jewish Museum in the Austrian town of Hohenems plays with issues of purity in a country where anti-immigrant rhetoric is part of the political debate and the “cleansing” of Jews once meant more than going to the mikvah.

Provocatively titled Ganz Rein! (the phrase means both “quite pure” and “go deeply into”), the show, which will run until October, celebrates the restoration and opening to the public of the Hohenems mikvah, which was originally built in 1829 and is the oldest preserved mikvah in Austria.

The mikvah restoration is the latest step in an ambitious municipal project, begun in the 1980s, to rehabilitate the town’s Jewish quarter and restore the memory of a time when Jews made up an important minority.

Ganz Rein! focuses specifically on the architecture, use, and symbolism of the ritual bath in Jewish tradition, but inevitably it touches on broader concerns. Museum Director Hanno Loewy said while there had been no conscious intention to use the exhibition’s title to evoke the term Judenrein, the infamous Nazi buzzword describing areas “cleansed of Jews,” he admitted that the reference was implicit—there under the surface, like it or not.

At its peak in the mid-19th century, the Jewish community of Hohenems numbered around 650 (out of a population of 3,000). Today, 16 percent of Hohenems’s 15,000 residents are immigrants with a Turkish Muslim background. (The total number of immigrants is considerably higher.) Last month, the far-right Freedom Party—which campaigns under slogans such as “The West belongs to Christians”—received nearly 23 percent of the votes in local elections. And Barbara Rosenkranz, the Freedom Party’s candidate in presidential elections scheduled for next week, has come under heavy fire for ambiguous statements on Nazi crimes and the Holocaust.

Loewy is one of two Jews living in Hohenems today. He said he hoped the mikvah exhibition would spark reflection on current conflicts between ritual and freedom, and religion and secular society. “It’s not a Jewish question,” he said, “but it’s a question of religion, and we have that same question when we talk about the headscarves of Muslims or a lot of the rites and dogmas of the [Catholic] church.” The mikvah, he added, “brings these questions to the most radical extreme because it’s about the body.”

The exhibit includes two very different photographic installations that reflect contrasting ways of looking at the Jewish experience. One is a series of evocative color images of mikvahs by German photographer Peter Seidel. Seidel concentrates on centuries-old ritual baths, long out of use. Worn stone steps and rusty iron railings lead down, down, down to empty chambers or, in some cases, basins that still hold a bit of water. The pictures are gorgeous, but they are strictly architectural. The mikvahs look very uninviting and very devoid of life. Even in the few modern baths Seidel has included, there are no signs of living beings, not even a stray towel or wet footprint.

In sharp contrast, the Mikvah Project, a text-and-image collaboration by the American photographer Janice Rubin and writer Leah Lax, explores the resurgence of “the rite of immersion” as a new form of Jewish spirituality among contemporary women. Rubin’s photographs, many of them taken under water, portray women during ritual immersion. The images—some close-ups but none showing the faces of the women portrayed—depict the “intimate, sensual, enigmatic nature” of a ritual that has been embraced by some Jewish feminists as a personal statement of womanhood.

Accompanying the photographs are excerpts from interviews that Lax conducted with women describing their own, often complex, relationship to the mikvah experience. These mainly positive expressions are juxtaposed with critical comments about the mikvah from interviews with mostly European women carried out by the Hohenems Museum. Together, the comments form what the museum calls a “controversial dialogue” about an ancient ritual that has been at the center of debate over tradition and reform for 200 years. (This dialogue also inspired an Internet radio project linked to the exhibit, www.radiomikwe.at).

The Mikvah Project exhibition has toured to two dozen venues in North America, but Hohenems marks the first time it has been mounted in Europe; from here it travels to Jewish museums in Vienna and in the German cities of Fuerth and Frankfurt.

The exhibition opening marked Lax’s first trip to a German-speaking country. She was, she said, struck by the power of German words she knew were “pareve” or neutral in today’s German language, but that were still to her, as an American, loaded with sinister baggage.

“Everything from anschluss, aktion, schnell, links, rechts,” she said. “These were the first words I identified and they were all creepy to me.” One of these words was “rein.” “When I heard the name of the exhibition, Ganz Rein, I instantly thought of Judenrein,” she said. At first this made her uncomfortable. “But then,” she added, “I took it as a cheeky retort: that yes, it was an intentional play on the word rein, but cheeky in that here you are immersed in that mikvah and you are actually rein—you’re pure, completely pure. Because, of course, a Jew was considered anything but. So, I took it as a very in-your-face response to the association of that word. I decided I really liked the title.”

Read full article at the site

Jewish Quarterly -- Virtual Judaism

2010-04-15T05:46:00.000-07:00

Even though I've never used the term "virtual Judaism," that's what the Jewish Quarterly in London titled my aritlce that ran in December. Read the full article at the web site by clicking HERE (you have to register, but registration is free).

Virtual Judaism

December 21, 2009
by Ruth Ellen Gruber

Representation is a moving target. Jewish culture is undergoing such changes that to pin it down to one representation is an illusion.
Prof. Jonathan Webber, 1999

I’m a Jewish vegetarian atheist.
Jonathan Ornstein, director, Jewish Community Center, Krakow, Poland, 2009

In the mid-1990s I began exploring a phenomenon that I described as ‘filling the Jewish space’ in Europe. Along with the efforts to revive Jewish communal life and reclaim and reassert Jewish identity in post-Holocaust, post-communist countries, I observed what I called a ‘Virtual Jewishness,’ or a ‘Virtual Jewish World,’ peopled by ‘Virtual Jews’ who create, perform, enact or engage with Jewish culture from an outsider perspective, often in the absence of local Jewish populations.

I wrote about non-Jewish klezmer bands, and Jewish museums and Jewish culture festivals organized by non-Jews for a primarily non-Jewish public. And I also described university Jewish studies programmes whose students were mostly Gentile, as well as the commercial exploitation of Jewish heritage, including the promotion of Jewish-themed tourism to synagogues, Jewish cemeteries and other sites of Jewish heritage where few if any Jews live today.

Although I discussed the ‘virtually Jewish’ phenomenon in a general European context, some of the most visible (and to some observers most troubling) manifestations were — and still are — observed in Poland, the historic heartland of Jewish life in Europe, where, as the scholar Jonathan Webber once noted, ‘the remarkable characteristic of anything to do with Jews…is its intensity.’

A project undertaken by the London-based Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR) provided a vivid statistical illustration of this. Between May 2000 and April 2001, it attempted to ‘map’ Jewish cultural activities in four European countries with small Jewish communities. The countries chosen — Poland, Sweden, Italy and Belgium — have a total Jewish population of well under 100,000 and had very different Jewish histories both before World War II and during and after the Shoah.

‘The results are simply astonishing, and as yet we have no idea what to make of them,’ Webber, who was an academic consultant on the project, reported in July 2001 at a conference in Budapest on Jewish identities in the post-communist era. ‘There is clearly no correlation between the considerable size of this cultural production and the percentage of Jews in a given total population of a particular country.’ It is almost, he added, as if ‘once one starts to have public Jewish culture, it simply continues to generate further events.’
Indeed, out of the four countries surveyed, Poland, with its tiny Jewish population (depending on how one defines ‘Jew,’ estimates vary from 3,000 to 20,000 or more in a total population of about 40 million), was by far the Jewish cultural champion, with 196 individual events and fully seven Jewish cultural festivals, including the annual Festival of Jewish culture in Krakow — the ‘largest and most important event’ recorded in the JPR survey.

The Festival — founded in 1988 by two young, non-Jewish intellectuals for a primarily non-Jewish public — takes place in Kazimierz, the historic Jewish quarter of Krakow, and nowhere, perhaps, has become more symbolic of the ‘virtually Jewish’ trends and the questions they raise than here.Centered on the most extensive surviving complex of Jewish built heritage in east-central Europe — synagogues, cemeteries, homes, marketplaces and other buildings and monuments, Kazimierz since the early 1990s has grown, and, indeed, been molded, into one of the major centers of Jewish tourism in Europe.

The post-communist development has seen the restoration of several synagogues and has brought new life and new business to what had long languished as the archetypical ‘Jewish ghost town.’ Even 15 years ago, much of Jewish Kazimierz was a derelict slum. At the same time this development has made the district one of the most prominent symbols of what has been called the marketing or ‘commodification’ of Jewish culture. The new Jewish-style cafes, boutiques, souvenir kitsch and constantly roving tour groups create an environment that has caused (and still causes) a deep sense of unease among some visitors, particularly as Krakow is only an hour’s drive from Auschwitz and often serves as a focal point for visits to the notorious death camp.

Writing about Kazimierz in 2006, for example, in a review of Jan T. Gross’s 2006 book Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz, the American journalist Ruth Franklin scorned what she termed the ‘much ballyhooed renaissance of Jewish culture in Poland, complete with sold-out klezmer festivals and a popular brand of spirits called “Kosher Vodka.” She wrote: ‘Half a dozen Jewish-themed hotels welcome visitors to Kazimierz, with names like “Alef” and “Ester” and “Klezmer Hois”; the “Eden” sports mezuzahs on every door and advertises ‘the only mikveh bath in Poland,’ as if it were a Jacuzzi.’ She goes on, ‘This grim carnival of Holocaust tourism and Western capital is neither a sign nor a symptom of a greater change in Polish society. It is evidence only of the Polish national schizophrenia on the subject of Jews. It is lovely to restore old buildings and to cherish a culture that has perished. But the celebration of the Jews of Poland cannot substitute for a genuine confrontation with the manner of their disappearance: when, where and by whom. There is no indication that the consumers of ‘Kosher Vodka’ are interested in engaging in such a reckoning any time soon.’

While it is hard to disagree with Franklin’s assertions, there is a bigger picture which she ignores. Poland does, indeed, have a certain schizophrenia towards its Jewish past but this schizophrenia has been demonstrated in loud and even lacerating public nationwide debates which is infinitely better, and ultimately more healthy, thatn the absolute denial and silence that existed until the 1980s.

‘When I began working in Poland in 1990, it was almost completely taboo to tell your friends that you are Jewish,’ Poland’s American-born chief rabbi Michael Schudrich told me recently. ‘Today, it is just a normal thing to say to almost anybody here in Poland. What was taboo only 20 years ago, is today a curiosity or interesting or [indicates] respect — and for some [it is] of no consequence at all.’
Likewise, in July 2006, Michael Steinlauf, an American academic expert on Yiddish culture and Polish-Jewish relations and the author of the book Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust (1997), told me that to him, during the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow, the Kazimierz district’s main square, Szeroka street, formed a symbolic ‘headquarters of the Diaspora’ thanks to the numerous cultural events and the many international Jewish artists, performers and fans who attended. I was speaking to him after he had enjoyed Friday night dinner with friends and family at one of the Szeroka street restaurants — a newly opened ‘mainstream’ restaurant, not one of the Jewish-style cafes. ‘We had a table for 11 and lit the candles,’ he told me. ‘The couple from the next table came over saying “Shalom Aleichem”. I’ve never done this anywhere else. It’s never been as easy to be a Jew than on Szeroka street the night before [the Festival’s outdoor final concert there].’

Krakow is home to several institutions promoting education on Jewish subjects. These include the Jewish studies centre at Jagiellonian University, founded in 1986, as well as the Jewish Culture Centre, established in 1993, as well as the Galicia Jewish Museum, founded by the late British photographer Chris Schwarz in 2004. The Jewish Culture Festival recently opened its own permanent culture and education centre called Cheder.
These institutions, which offer varied programs of lectures, classes, concerts and workshops, are generally run by non-Jews to serve the general public, including tourists. But all benefit from the input of Jewish scholars and Jewish religious and cultural figures.

The number of Jews in Krakow remains tiny — somewhere between 200 and 400 depending on whom you talk to. But the Jewish community has raised its own profile in recent years, in part thanks to the formation of a Jewish youth group, Czulent, in 2004 and also to the opening in 2008 of a modern Jewish Community Centre. (Mainly funded by World Jewish Relief and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the JCC project had a somewhat high profile from the outset. It came about, remarkably, at the urging of Prince Charles, who had visited Krakow in 2002 and was moved by the plight of the poor and aging Jews of the city. Charles himself returned to Krakow last year for its inauguration; wearing a kippah he helped affix a mezuzah to the door.)

The JCC director, Jonathan Ornstein, is a 39-year-old New Yorker who made aliyah and then moved to Krakow about seven years ago to teach Hebrew at the Jagiellonian University. Ornstein contradicts the stereotype of the traditional Jew as portrayed in the old paintings and photographs that fill books, decorate the local Jewish-style cafes or are caricatured in the wooden figurines for sale in souvenir shops and craft markets. Knowledgeable but iconoclastic, and an avowed ‘Jewish vegetarian atheist,’ he took part in an ‘atheist pride’ march in Krakow this year, carrying a sign reading ‘Thank God I’m an atheist.’ Not only that, he created a Facebook group called ‘I want the Beastie Boys to play the XX Jewish Cultural Festival in Krakow.’
Recently, I noted to Ornstein that that is increasingly little direct memory anymore in Poland of a time when the country was home to Europe’s largest Jewish population. For the student-age crowd that attends Jewish Culture Festival events or hangs out in the music pubs that have made Kazimierz the scene of trendy night life, what goes on today is what ‘Jewish’ means. Few of them can even remember a time before the Festival existed or before the district was a Jewish tourist attraction, with all the attendant commercialization.
He agreed. Kazimierz, Ornstein said, was to his mind not the ‘former’ but the ‘present’ Jewish quarter of Krakow.

‘Nobody alive today has a good memory of Kazimierz when it was better than it is now,’ he said. ‘There was the war, and then after the war it was derelict for decades. Now, it’s the hippest place in the city. The whole ‘former’ thing is based on history, not living memory.’
The success of the Festival of Jewish Culture in Krakow helped spark other Jewish festivals of various types around the country. In 2000, the JPR Mapping project identified seven of them. Today, the number is much greater: in 2009, I counted more than 20, including at least two Jewish film festivals.
Some were one-day affairs, others spanned a weekend or longer. Some took place in towns with small Jewish communities, such as Wroclaw, Poznan and Gdansk. Others took place where no Jews live today. These included the sixth edition of a festival dedicated to the Yiddish author Shalom Asch, scheduled for early December in the central town of Kutno, the third edition of an annual Jewish culture festival in the village of Checiny, a Jewish theatre festival in Ostrowiec Swietokrzyski, the annual Jewish culture festival in Chmielnik, a Jewish culture festival in Bialystok, another in Szczekonciny, another in Przysucha, and so on. Festivals celebrating a diversity of cultures and religions, including Judaism, took place in Lodz, Wlodowa and Szczebrzeszyn.

‘I often joke that now the mayor of every small town feels obliged to make excuses [if] he/she has no Jewish Festival in his/her town,’ Anna Dodziuk, a psychotherapist who is also a Jewish activist and editor, told me. ‘To put it short: it is politically correct now to explore the Jewish history of the local communities, to commemorate Jews of a shtetl who perished in Holocaust, to celebrate somehow Jewish culture. So more and more Jews start to feel secure enough to be openly Jewish (or to be visible).’
In fact, some of the festivals had religious observance at their heart. One of these was a Shabbaton weekend held in October in Kielce. Most of Kielce’s 25,000 pre-war Jewish were killed in Treblinka, but the town is far better known for what happened after the war; it is infamous for the July 1946 pogrom that killed 42 Jews, an attack that formed the basis of Jan T. Gross’s book Fear.

The event brought prayers to the synagogue for the first time since the Holocaust — the building has been used as an archive for nearly 60 years. It also included lectures, workshops, exhibitions, concerts and film screenings. It was the latest in a series of Shabbaton programs in long-disused synagogues in Poland organized by Michael Traison, an observant Jewish America lawyer who has an office in Warsaw and has spent much of his time in Poland over the past 15 years.

Jews and Catholics took part in the event. ‘For the first time in my life I could celebrate the beginning of the Shabbat,’ a Catholic man wrote on the Shabbaton web site. ‘I could feel myself what I already knew theoretically, namely — what the Shabbat means for Jews who treat their faith seriously. Boi kala is also a challenge or a question on how I, a Christian man, treat my “shabbat” — Sunday. Thanks to Jews’ testimony of how they treat their holy day, I treat my one more seriously.’
The biggest Jewish Culture Festival outside Krakow was the sixth edition of the annual ‘Singer’s Warsaw’ festival in the Polish capital at the beginning of September. Singer’s Warsaw is sponsored by the secular Jewish Shalom organization. Shalom was founded in 1988 and is headed by the Yiddish singer Golda Tencer, now in her 60s, who for years was the star of Warsaw’s State Yiddish Theatre — her husband, Szymon Szurmiej, has been head of the Theatre since 1969.

The Shalom Foundation has sponsored events such as highschool essay competitions on Jewish topics, concerts, art exhibits, Jewish film festivals, a Jewish song competition, and the like. Outside of Poland, however, it is best known for the remarkable 1996 exhibition and book And I Still See Their Faces.This was a collection of more than 450 photographs of Polish Jews, ranging from formal studio portraits to faded snapshots of everyday life. They were culled from photographs sent in — mainly by non-Jewish Poles — from all over Poland. The number of photos sent in, about 8,000, more or less equals the number of self-identifying Jews living in Poland today.

The exhibit showed the broadest cross-section possible of Jews in pre-war Poland, orthodox and secular; assimilated and traditional. As such it turned somatic and other stereotypes (including that of Jews as victims) on their head. In the pictures, wrote Tencer in an introduction to the book, ‘the light falls on faces still free of terror and fear. We can see on them quiet reflection, the joy of family life, a smile that manifests belief in a friendly world.’

Paradoxically, much of this sensitivity is trumped by theatricality in the way that the Singer Festival is mounted.

The Festival’s stated aim, according to its web- site is ‘to reconstruct the prewar atmosphere here in order to present the annihilated world of the Polish Jews.’ Unlike in Krakow, where the entire Kazimierz district remains largest intact, almost all of downtown Warsaw, including the Jewish quarter and wartime Ghetto, was destroyed during the Second World War. The Singer festival takes place in and around one-block-long Prozna street, one of the only streets in Warsaw’s historic downtown Jewish district to have survived.
During the festival, the dilapidated street is turned into a sort of stage, with old photographs of Polish Jews affixed to windows or hung from wires attached to the buildings. I admit that I haven’t attended the Singer Festival, but — from afar — the costumed, Renaissance Faire-style ‘performing the Jew’ that is described on the festival’s web site (and shown in posted pictures) makes me rather more uneasy than do many of the other manifestations of public Jewish culture:
Along Próžna Street we create Jewish cafés, quaint shops and workshops. We construct an old bookstore and a newspaper office in which [Isaac Bashevis] Singer worked in New York before the war. Each year we make a wine bar and a bakery. Everyone can come inside, and have a look at collected odds and ends in use at the beginning of the twentieth-century. There are lots of souvenirs to be bought from street vendors and many home-made tidbits to be tasted. Many characteristic figures appear in the streets during the festival: Hasidics, merchants, painters, shoemakers, tailors, printers, blacksmiths, barrel organ players, entertainers, florists. All of them contributed to making Warsaw uniquely colorful. During the festival, just as in the past, one can hear klezmer music, chants from synagogues, as well as well-known traditional Jewish songs, in the heart of the Polish capital. The past reality is revived by many exhibitions and plays, artists’ installations, scientific sessions, and meetings with writers and Jewish artists. Yiddish culture returns through prewar films, song and dance workshops, paper cutting, ceramics as well as Hebrew calligraphy, lectures and discussion groups.

My use of the term ‘Virtual’ deliberately played on the cyberspace concept of virtual worlds and virtual communities exiting on the Internet. Even back then, these included many, many Jewish websites.
‘People can enter, move around and engage in cyberspace virtual worlds without physically leaving their desks or quitting their “real world” identities,’ I wrote in my 2002 book Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe:

Online, however, they can assume other identities, play other roles and be, or act as if they are, whoever they want. Like virtual worlds on the Internet, the various aspects of ‘Virtual Jewry’ are linked together and overlapping. One can approach them either passively, as a mere consumer, or ‘interactively,’ in a participatory manner, through, for example, performance and interpretation. They may be enriched by input from contemporary Jewish communal, intellectual, institutional, or religious sources, or they may be self-contained within totally non-Jewish contexts.

Virtually Jewish came out several years before the advent of social networking sites such as Facebook, and also well before what has been called a ‘Virtual Diaspora’ took root in the online world known as Second Life, where a ‘virtual synagogue’, Temple Beth Israel, was established there in 2006.
One year later, reported 2Life Magazine, Second Life’s Jewish community was ‘more diverse in age, religious affiliation and […] geographical origin than any community could be in the real world, and it also includes many religious seekers who use Second Life as a tool to explore their own roots, many of them with little to no Jewish educational background.’

Second Life Judaism, it said, was ‘a unique intercultural dialogue within various streams of Judaism, within various Diasporas and Israel, within various age groups and with Jews and non-Jews. Judaism in Second Life is a mélange of different identities, in which age, origin, gender, and even religious affiliation are unimportant. It is an experiment with an uncertain outcome, but with obvious potential for new and creative ways to explore culture, heritage and identity.’

The ‘virtual diaspora’ in Second Life is symptomatic of an even broader Jewish presence in cyberspace which has grown exponentially in the past decade and which now includes many websites, blogs and Facebook groups that originate in Poland — among Jews and ‘virtual Jews’ alike.
Among the most impressive and inclusive of these is the so-called ‘Virtual Shtetl,’ a web portal set up by the huge new Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which is under construction in Warsaw. Its aim is to be both an information portal as well as a sort of Jewish social networking site.

‘The “Virtual Shtetl” is a museum without barriers, a consequent extension of the real Museum,’ the website says. ‘Its main objective is to provide a unique social forum for everyone interested in Polish-Jewish life.’
The website includes constantly expanding databases of historic and contemporary photographs and archival information about specific towns all around Poland, as well as blog-like, frequently updated news items and announcements of Jewish interest related to Poland. In October alone there were more than 60 items posted.
‘Currently, our portal is a source of information but, in the future, it will also include an interactive system by which Internet users will interact with each other,’ the site says, in phrases that echo my own description of interaction in the flesh and blood ‘virtual Jewish world.’

The Virtual Shtetl, it says, ‘will create a link between Polish-Jewish history and the contemporary, multi-cultural world.’

These ‘virtual’ links will enhance links that already exist, creating a sort of clearing house for many activities that already take place. Indeed, the past decade already the Krakow Jewish Festival has included a ceremony at which the Israeli ambassador honors non-Jewish Poles who preserve, conserve and promote Jewish culture and memory.

It is all part of a process of ‘normalisation’ Dodziuk said. ‘I’m sure it has its influence on a Jewish perception of the situation in Poland.’ For local populations in many places, she said, ‘These pre-war Jewish inhabitants have become “our people,” part of our local tradition.’ Earlier this year, she added, on a trip with an Israel friend through eastern and southeastern Poland, she met many people in small towns who now considered the Jewish history of these one-times shtetls part and parcel of their own local past and personal memories.
‘It is,’ she said, ‘obviously much more and much deeper than political correctness.’

Latest Centropa column -- Budapest

2010-04-01T14:33:00.000-07:00

The Hummus bar on Kertesz utca. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

My latest travel column for Centropa.org is a guide to some of the cafes and restaurants I like to hang out in in Budapest's old downtown Jewish quarter.

Budapest's Seventh District Wakes Up

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

BUDAPEST -- The last time I wrote about Budapest on Centropa I provided an itinerary of Jewish sights and resources, most of them in and around the city's Seventh District, the old downtown Jewish quarter anchored by three grand synagogues forming a so-called "Jewish triangle."

That was eight years ago, and the former Jewish quarter still had the reputation of being one of the city's poorest inner districts. There were some signs of incipient gentrification, but World War II bullet holes pocked many crumbling facades, vacant lots yawned, and the grimy streets were dark and uninviting. A lot has changed since then.

Much of the District is still neglected. But already at the end of 2007 the New York Times ran a travel story called "Out of Darkness, New Life" that described how the district's "history and recent rise to trendiness" evoke "comparisons to the Lower East Side of New York." A recent issue of Time Out Budapest magazine went even further, terming the Jewish quarter a major city "bar vortex." In fact, the district burgeons with new cafes, clubs, bistros and wine bars that attract a young, hip -- and often Jewish -- crowd.

At the same time, though, this type of growth has been paralleled by controversial urban renewal projects that have seen many old buildings torn down and replaced by rather soulless modern structures. A citizens group, OVAS, has been formed to lobby for the protection of what remains -- particularly in light of real estate corruption involved in some of the development schemes. The Mayor of the Seventh District himself, in fact, was jailed last year on suspicion of bribery and abuse of office related to property transactions.

I've maintained a small apartment in the Seventh District for more than a decade. Though I only spend part of my time here, I've been observing the changes in the quarter up close; after all, it's my neighborhood.
In particular, I enjoy the new venues and Jewish haunts that have nothing to do with a nostalgic sense of a vanished past but everything to do with how Jews in Budapest -- and particularly young Jews in Budapest -- are experimenting with ways to build a lively present and, one hopes, a sustainable future.

With this article, I would like to introduce readers to some of the haunts in and around the Jewish quarter that I tend to frequent: whether for breakfast cappuccino or afternoon espresso, for an inexpensive lunch, or for dinner or late night drinks and conversation. Or simply as somewhere to sit and use the free WiFi internet that most venues in the district seem to offer.

As I noted in my earlier Centropa article on Budapest, the Seventh District was the first and most important Jewish quarter in Pest, the flat part of Budapest that spreads out on the eastern bank of the Danube.
Today's downtown Deak Square and the massive red brick Madach apartment complex occupy the site of Orczy House, a vast structure built in the 1700s that was a central focus of Jewish life in Budapest throughout the 19th century. Orczy House was demolished as part of an urban renewal project in the 1930s. Before that, it served as a self-contained warren of synagogues, study houses, apartments, baths, restaurants, cafes, shops, warehouses, and workshops: the place where many Jews from the provinces first found a home when they moved into the big city.

The broader Jewish quarter eventually spread out from here, with Kiraly street, at the edge of the Seventh, becoming its major commercial avenue, a heavily trafficked thoroughfare lined by many fine neoclassical buildings. The back streets branching off Kiraly street into the Seventh comprised a dense network of shops, artisans' workshops, and tenements built around connecting courtyards encircled by balconies and tiny flats. At the heart of the district was what is now called Klauzal square, an open space fronting one of the city's district market halls that became the center of the World War II ghetto.

The three main synagogues that form the "Jewish Triangle" are all in the inner part of the district -- the twin-towered Dohany St. synagogue and the orthodox synagogue complex on Kazinczy street, both in use and both fully restored and refurbished in recent years, and the Moorish-style synagogue on Rumbach street, which still stands disused and in disrepair, after restoration was halted for lack of funds.

Most of the cafes and other venues I mention are within a ten-minute walk of these synagogues, and are also close to two synagogues run by Chabad, one on Deak square and one on Vasvary Pal street.
These are only a few of the many cafes and restaurants in the district -- but they tend to be the one that I (and my friends) frequent.

Read Full Article

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- Il Duce online

2010-02-22T13:35:00.000-08:00

My latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column is about the flap over iMussolini -- the app for the IPhone and IPod touch that at the end of January was the best-selling app on the Italian ITunes store...

iMussolini app flap restirs debate on Il Duce’s legacy

By Ruth Ellen Gruber · February 21, 2010

ROME (JTA) -- Over the past few days I've been watching online videos of "Il Duce," Italy's World War II fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.

There are hundreds on YouTube, and some of the clips have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.
Most are taken from the fascist-era newsreels that were part of Mussolini's powerful propaganda machine.

They show military parades and motorcades, or Il Duce, with his jackboots and jutting chin, orating before enormous adoring crowds. Quite a few are pro-fascist tributes posted by admirers who even today regard Mussolini as their ideological guide

What prompted my interest was the recent flap over iMussolini, an iPhone application that collated the texts of more than 120 of Mussolini's speeches, plus audio and video clips of the dictator in action.

iMussolini went up on the Italian iTunes store on Jan. 21, and with more than 1,000 downloads a day was the site's best-selling app until it was yanked two weeks later because of possible copyright violation of material in the state archives. A revised version, which added text but deleted audio, went back on sale Feb. 9

iMussolini has caused a stir in a country where Il Duce and his legacy remain a divisive issue.
Comments left on the YouTube clips run the gamut from passionate affirmations of "Viva il Duce!" to utter condemnation.

"It's disgusting," reads one of the more than 6,000 responses to a clip of Mussolini's speech declaring war in 1940. "Our fathers and grandfathers were completely crazy, robbed of their brains, reduced to being shameful assassins."

Mussolini came to power in Italy in 1922, when he and his fascist forces marched on Rome. Under his iron-fisted regime, Italy took many steps toward modernization. But he led the country into ruin with his disastrous alliance with Nazi Germany and instituted harsh anti-Semitic laws in 1938. Partisans executed Mussolini and his mistress in 1945, and their bodies were strung up by their heels in a Milan piazza.

Fascism is outlawed in Italy today, but some Italians now equate both fascists and partisans as patriots, and a visible segment of the political far-right regards Mussolini as a hero. His tomb in the northeast town of Predappio is a place of pilgrimage, where souvenir shops sell all sorts of fascist memorabilia. Skinheads give the fascist salute in his honor, and there are flourishing Mussolini groups on Facebook -- one boasts more than 6,000 fans.

The iMussolini app's developer, 25-year-old Luigi Marino, denies wanting to cash in on fascist nostalgia. He said he created his app simply by collating historical material that is freely available in bookstores, in libraries and online.

Presenting it without comment, he says on the iTunes site, enables an "unconditioned analysis of what took place in those years."

Others see it quite differently.

One leftist group called iMussolini a "hymn to fascism." And a Holocaust survivor association branded it "an insult to the memory of all victims of Nazism and fascism" and an "offense to decency and conscience."
In fact, there is a complex dilemma involved.

Mussolini's rule -- and the power he exercised over his countrymen -- formed an epoch of Italian history whose impact is still being felt today.

Postwar Italian democracy was built on a foundation of anti-fascism that exalted the wartime anti-fascist resistance while it minimized the extent to which many Italians had supported Mussolini’s regime -- indeed, before 1938, Fascist Party ranks had included thousands of Jews.

In recent years, new debates over the "true" nature of Italian fascism and its legacy have arisen, along with a less ideological examination of history that seeks to separate myth from fact.

The speeches on the iMussolini app, "like them or not, form part of history," said Il Duce's granddaughter, Alessandra Mussolini, a longtime right-wing member of the Italian parliament. "But if you want to wipe out history with censorship, help yourself."

With the iMussolini app, however, the issue is not censorship. It is, instead, where the line gets drawn between history and opinion, facts and propaganda.

"This is an ugly side of Italian history and is not something to be sold on iTunes, out of context, like a video game or song," said Angelo Pontecorboli, a Florence-based artist and publisher. "For thousands of Italian Jews like me," he added, "it was part of our suffering."

I didn't buy iMussolini when the app first came out. But when the revised version went on line, I decided to invest $2 and take a look.

It's a little creepy.

For one thing, most of the user comments on the iTunes site come from nostalgic pro-fascists who, as one put it, found it "great to have il Duce always with me."

Then on the app itself, a disclaimer that it "does not intend to celebrate Fascism but exclusively contains historical documents" is misleading.

The app's biography of Mussolini clearly was written from the standpoint of an admirer. And the "historical documents" it contains provide a sanitized picture of his regime that is far from complete.

The app's list of laws, public works and other measures taken under fascism, for example, notes how under Mussolini the Italian railways became "the best outfitted and most efficient in Europe." But it fails to mention the regime's sexism, militarism and harsh suppression of dissent. Or even the 1938 racial laws that made anti-Semitic persecution a fundamental part of fascism's guiding principles.

Read the story on JTA

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- Riffing on the Swiss minaret ban

2010-01-14T11:33:00.000-08:00

Oops -- I forgot to post this last month.... my Ruthless Cosmopolitan column riffing on the Swiss minaret ban and historic bans on synagogue architecture.

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN
Swiss minaret ban recalls synagogue bans of past eras

By Ruth Ellen Gruber · December 14, 2009

VILNIUS, Lithuania (JTA) -- A week after the Swiss referendum banning the construction of new mosque minarets in Switzerland, I flew to Vilnius, Lithuania, for a seminar that focused on the destruction of Jewish heritage in Lithuania during the Holocaust.

The timing was coincidental. And I realize that the Swiss voters who overwhelmingly approved the minaret ban were responding to scare tactics that raised the specter of an extremist Islamic takeover in their country.

Yet in a certain way, the Swiss vote Nov. 29 and the Lithuanian seminar were connected.

To me, the ban on minarets recalled centuries of restrictions on the size or prominence of synagogues. The Swiss ban is just the latest example of how governmental authorities target religious architecture as a means of limiting religious or cultural expression.

From early medieval times, synagogues in Europe often were forbidden to stand taller than Christian churches, and in many cases they were forbidden even to be outwardly visible. There were restrictions on synagogue architecture in Muslim countries, too.

This had nothing to do with zoning. It was a way for the dominant religion to demonstrate control over minority faiths, their practice and their adherents.

Opulently decorated synagogue sanctuaries often were hidden behind anonymous exteriors, and a number of synagogues had their floors and foundations laid much lower than street level so they wouldn't be too tall. These included Vilnius' own Great Synagogue, which was built in the early 17th century.

But religious architecture, too, often suffered much worse than restrictive regulation; it was targeted for destruction as a symbol of the people who prayed there.

"Beginning in the fourth century and continuing through the Middle Ages, and again in the 20th century, the 'legal' restriction and destruction of synagogues quickly led to the same policies applied against individuals, and then whole communities," said Samuel Gruber, president of the International Survey of Jewish Monuments.

(Sam is one of the leading international authorities on Jewish heritage -- and also my brother. We have worked together for many years on issues related to Jewish heritage preservation.)

During the Holocaust, the Nazis torched, blew up or desecrated hundreds of synagogues with the same fervor that they devoted to destroying Jewish communities, culture and civilization.

More recently, during the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s, Orthodox Serb, Catholic Croat and Muslim Bosniak fighters destroyed mosques, churches and other culturally significant places.

The term "warchitecture" was coined at the time to describe the deliberate destruction of architectural heritage as a tool of conflict or persecution.

The lasting impact of the Holocaust destruction of Jewish heritage was the focus of our seminar in Vilnius. It brought together representatives of various local institutions to discuss how the important Jewish contribution to the history and culture of Vilnius could most effectively be made known to today's residents and visitors.

How to convey what was lost in the absence of tangible traces was a key part of the agenda.

"In a sense we are in search of the lost Vilnius," said Deividas Matulionis, chancellor to Lithuania’s prime minister.

Vilnius, known in Yiddish as Vilna, was the so-called Jerusalem of the North. It was home in the 18th century to one of modern Judaism's most influential intellectual and spiritual leaders, the so-called Vilna Gaon, Elijah ben Solomon Zalman.

Before World War II, about 100,000 Jews lived here. The Great Synagogue, standing in the heart of what is today's postcard-perfect Old Town, was the most magnificent of more than 100 synagogues and prayer houses in the city.

The Vilnius Old Town today is on UNESCO's roster of World Heritage Sites, but almost no physical traces of its Jewish past remain. There are a few street names, wall inscriptions and plaques, but that's it.

The Great Synagogue itself, and the teeming Jewish quarter around it, was bombed during World War II and its ruins were razed by the Soviets in the 1950s. A kindergarten was built on the site.

Controversy has raged for years over what to do with the old Jewish quarter.

One multimillion-dollar plan, promoted by a Jewish member of Parliament and activist, Emanuelis Zingeris, called for sites, including the Great synagogue, to be rebuilt. The plan was approved but never really got off the ground due to financial considerations and opposition from within the 5,000-member Jewish community.

Complicating matters is Lithuanian society’s ambivalence about its past. Local nationalists regard the Nazis as liberators and the postwar Soviet government as an occupier, and anti-Nazi activity gets conflated with Soviet oppression. The Genocide Victims Museum in Vilnius is mainly about the Soviet persecution of Lithuanians between 1940 and 1991.

Local Lithuanians collaborated with Nazis to help kill about 90 percent of the 250,000 Jews who lived in Lithuania before the war. For Holocaust survivors, the Soviets were liberators before they became an occupying power.

The destruction of nearly all traces of Jewish historic presence in Vilnius left a gaping hole that has yet to be filled.

I know it's a very long way from a ban on new minarets to the much more drastic measures that led to this state of affairs. But as my brother Sam put it, "Restricting specific types of religious or cultural expression -- especially when such restrictions are deliberate exceptions to existing building, zoning, health and safety codes -- is discriminatory."

It is, he said, "an act of denigration of cultural custom and, by extension, of the people who cherish, or the religion that requires, those very customs."

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- Arson attack on synagogue in Crete

2010-01-14T11:26:00.000-08:00

My latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column riffs on the arson attack last week on the Etz Hayyim synagogue in Hania, Crete. Read the story at the JTA web site by clicking HERE.

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN
Attack on Crete synagogue carries special meaning

By Ruth Ellen Gruber · January 13, 2010

ROME (JTA) -- The vandals who torched the historic Etz Hayyim synagogue in Hania, an ancient port on the Greek island of Crete, left no doubt about their motives.

After breaking into the building on the night of Jan. 5 and setting its interior alight, they threw a bar of soap against its outer wall.

A bar of soap? That's because, explains the synagogue's director, Nikos Stavroulakis, "I'll make you into a bar of soap" is a common anti-Semitic taunt in Greece. Since the Holocaust, there has been a persistent belief that the Nazis made soap from Jewish corpses.

Even though scholars have disproved the idea, bars of soap have been buried reverently in some European Jewish cemeteries under solemn memorials.

"In this place lie the remains of Jewish martyrs exterminated by German fascists and turned into soap," reads the inscription on an obelisk in Piatra Neamt, Romania.

The power of this belief was examined in "The Soap Myth," a play by Jeff Cohen that ran last summer in New York. Based on a true story, the play focused on the efforts of an elderly Holocaust survivor "on a one-man mission to get the 'soap myth' reclassified as fact," Marissa Brostoff wrote in Tablet magazine.

But at the heart of the story was something much more.

What was at stake, Brostoff wrote, was "the way we choose to see the past, a struggle between a dispassionate approach relying on facts and figures and another, much more subjective one that holds survivors' testimonies to be unarguably true and ultimately sacred."

Anti-Semitic violence is anything but dispassionate.

The bar of soap hurled against the desecrated synagogue in Hania was a diabolically mixed metaphor: Soap usually symbolizes purity and godliness, but in this twisted context it spelled hatred and death.

The attack on the Hania synagogue was not just an assault on a building. It was an assault on the ideals that had transformed the structure from a wrecked relic of Holocaust destruction to a new symbol of community and compassion.

This transformation was accomplished largely through the efforts of Stavroulakis, a remarkable man who has devoted much of the past two decades to restoring a Jewish presence to a city made "Judenrein" by the Nazis.

I met Stavroulakis when I visited Hania in 1996. An artist, author and scholar who had co-founded and directed the Jewish Museum in Athens, Stavroulakis had returned to live in his family's rambling house in Hania after many years away.

The synagogue, which dates back to the 15th century, was in ruin. But over the next three years Stavroulakis made it his mission to raise funds and, with the help of the World Monuments Fund and other donors, oversee the building's rebirth. His aim was to make it a living spiritual presence, not simply a restored reminder of the past.

The synagogue now functions as a museum, and it hosts exhibitions and cultural events.

It’s also an active house of worship. A small Havurah community whose members include Christians and some Muslims -- as well as Jews of all persuasions -- regularly assembles there to celebrate Shabbat and Jewish holidays.

Stavroulakis himself leads daily prayers each morning, whether a minyan is present or not.

Prayers were held as usual at 9 a.m. Jan. 6, the morning after the arson attack. The fire had gutted a stairway, wreaked havoc on the synagogue library, and covered walls and precious furnishings with a thick layer of soot.

"Fortunately," Stavroulakis said, "the fabric of the synagogue was and is intact."

He was referring to the physical structure of the building, but I think he also meant that the symbolic identity of the synagogue also had survived -- and would be maintained.

"We must be angry over what has happened to our synagogue," he told the small group of worshipers gathered for prayers amid the soot. "If we were not, it would be an indication that we were either indifferent or morally numb."

But, Stavroulakis asked, just where should the anger be directed? Local indifference and the ignorance that promotes racism had to be addressed.

"We have tried at Etz Hayyim to be a small presence in the midst of what is at times almost aggressive ignorance," he wrote on the synagogue blog. "We have done this to such a degree that our doors are open from early in the morning until late in the day so that the synagogue assumes its role as a place of prayer, recollection and reconciliation."

There is, Stavroulakis wrote, little if any sign of overt security.

"This character of the synagogue must not change and the doors must remain open," he wrote. If not, that means "we have given in to the ignorance that has perpetrated this desecration."

A week after the attack, the Etz Hayyim blog posted pictures showing that thanks in large part to volunteers, the walls of the sanctuary already had been painted and other clean-up work was well under way.

"The impact of this [attack] will be wider than simply an act of terrorism against Jews," Stavroulakis told me. "Already it is being seen in a much wider social context that has to do with civic responsibility and care."

Tablet Magazine -- Olive Oil

2009-12-17T11:28:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-14T05:02:00.000-08:00

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....

2009-11-11T11:16:00.000-08:00

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

2009-10-03T02:45:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-03T02:35:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-10T07:49:00.001-07:00

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

2009-08-21T14:42:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-04T05:22:00.000-07:00

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

I Receive a High Honor from Poland

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Forward -- Krakow's Jewish Cafes

Arty Semite Blog: Traveling the Czechgrass Trail

Oswiecim, the city of Auschwitz, wrestles with whether the past must be part of its future

Poland -- My nytimes.com article on the Gwozdziec synagogue project

Ruthless Cosmopolitan -- Never Better in Krakow?

Ruthless Cosmopolitian -- At a Jewish time of reflection, thoughts on a Pope and Catholicism

Can umbrella groups hold Jewish Europe together?

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN: Egypt uprising carries echoes of Poland’s Solidarity movement 30 years ago

By Ruth Ellen Gruber · February 15, 2011

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN: Helping an Orphan of History Recover Its Past

Helping an orphan of history recover its past

By Ruth Ellen Gruber · January 20, 2011

Berlusconi article

With Berlusconi tottering, Israel-Italy ties appear safe

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- Start-up Continent

Startup continent: European Jewry

By Ruth Ellen Gruber · November 10, 2010

Tablet Magazine -- Heym on the Range

Following in Gustav Mahler's footsteps in the Czech Republic

On the Trail of Gustav Mahler

By RUTH ELLEN GRUBER

Published: October 15, 2010

Article -- Calabrian village honors Philadelphia artist

Italian Village Honors Work of Philly Artist

Ruthless Cosmopolitan -- Savoring "goulash Judaism" in Budapest

European Day of Jewish Culture

Introducing non-Jewish Europeans to Jewish life

Symposium and Exhibit in Nocara, Calabria

Nocara — Exhibit Opening and Conference

Ruthless Cosmopolitan -- Shabbatons for non-Jews in Poland

In Poland, Shabbatons for non-Jews to combat anti-Semitism

Budapest -- Progressive Jewish Music Scene

Jewish fusion music key to Budapest’s ‘Jewstock’ festival

By Ruth Ellen Gruber · July 22, 2010

Conference on Shirley Moskowitz's art in Calabria

Centropa -- Travel Column on Vienna

Centropa -- Travel Column on Prague

Ruthless Cosmopolitan -- Venice