Ruthless Cosmopolitan: Jewish Heritage in Slovakia

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN: In Slovakia, Being Strategic About Preserving Jewish Heritage

August 28, 2011

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia (JTA) -- In 1989, on the eve of the fall of communism, the American poet Jerome Rothenberg published a powerful series of poems called "Khurbn" that dealt with the impact of the Holocaust on Eastern Europe.

In one section, he recorded conversations he had had in Poland with local people who had little recollection of the flourishing pre-war Jewish presence.

"Were there once Jews here?" the poem goes. "Yes, they told us, yes they were sure there were, though there was no one here who could remember. What was a Jew like? they asked.

"No one is certain still if they exist."

I often think of this poem when I travel to far-flung places in Eastern and Central Europe, and it was certainly on my mind on a trip to Slovakia this August.


That's because yes, there are still Jews here, and the post-Communist revival has reinvigorated Jewish communities in the region.


But also, despite this, numbers are still so small that even in many places where Jews once made up large parts of the population, Jewish history and heritage have been, or run the risk of being, forgotten.


"Look," my friend Maros Borsky reminded me in Bratislava. "Kids who were born after 1989 don't even remember communism."

Borsky is trying to do something about this -- which is why I was in Slovakia.


The vice president of the Bratislava Jewish community, Borsky is also Slovakia's leading Jewish scholar and expert on Slovak Jewish heritage.
 At 37 he is the leading Slovak Jewish activist of his generation, engaged in everything from religious, cultural and educational initiatives to his own personal commitment to raising his daughters in a Jewish home.

"I'll do anything to support his efforts, he has made such a difference to Jewish life here," said Andrew Goldstein, a British Reform rabbi who has played a hands-on role in nurturing Jewish revival in the Czech Republic and Slovakia for more than two decades.

Now chairman of the European Union for Progressive Judaism, Goldstein comes to Bratislava once a month to hold classes and lead a non-Orthodox Shabbat service as an alternative to the one conducted by the city's only resident rabbi, Baruch Myers, who is affiliated with Chabad.


Goldstein and I met in Bratislava nearly six years ago when he officiated at Borsky's wedding.
 This time, Goldstein and his wife and I, along with half a dozen Israeli journalists, were on a five-day tour that Borsky led to Jewish communities and heritage sites around the country.


The aim was to introduce the Slovak Jewish Heritage Route, an educational and touristic itinerary Borsky devised as a means of integrating Jewish heritage and memory into local tourism, culture and education so that Jews, their history and their fate are not forgotten.


I have followed the development of the route ever since Borsky first conceived it five years ago, and I believe it is an important strategic endeavor that could provide a model for other countries. Only 3,000 Jews live in Slovakia today, but there are synagogue buildings or Jewish cemeteries in literally hundreds of towns and even major cities. The Slovak Jewish community does not have the resources to save or even to care for all these places.

So Borsky convinced communal leaders to sanction a strategy that concentrates on just a few. This resulted in his Slovak Jewish Heritage Route, which includes 24 flagship sites in all eight regions of the country: mainly synagogues, but also Jewish cemeteries, Holocaust memorials and museums. They are marked with plaques bearing a distinctive logo.

Each was chosen for its historic or architectural significance but also for its sustainability. This does not mean, of course, that other sites should be forgotten. But to be included on the route, there must be a partnership in place with a local body to ensure long-term care and maintenance.

Our tour took in more than a dozen of the sites: from the active synagogue in Bratislava to Presov in the far east, where the magnificence of the surviving synagogue utterly dwarfs the potential of a Jewish community that now numbers only a few dozen people. We saw synagogues used as art galleries, and one now used as an art school. There were little Jewish exhibits, and ruined synagogues still undergoing repair. In one of these, the partially ruined synagogue in Liptovsky Mikulas, Goldstein and his wife stopped to chant prayers so that the sounds of Jewish liturgy could once again be heard.

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.

Ruthless Cosmopolitan -- Never Better in Krakow?

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

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."

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

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

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.

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- Start-up Continent

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."

Ruthless Cosmopolitan -- Savoring "goulash Judaism" in Budapest

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."

Ruthless Cosmopolitan -- Shabbatons for non-Jews in Poland

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

Ruthless Cosmopolitan -- Venice

 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

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- Arson attack on synagogue in Crete

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."