Ruthless Cosmopolitan -- In Summer, Jewish studies programs flourish

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.

Tablet Magazine -- Mikvah exhibition in Hohenems

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