by Ruth Ellen Gruber
On an overcast afternoon not long ago, two friends and I found ourselves plodding to and fro amid a forest of crooked gravestones in the centuries-old Jewish cemetery in Bolekhiv, a small town in western Ukraine south of L'viv.We were on a sort of pilgrimage, methodically pushing through weeds and peering closely at eroding epitaphs, trying to find the tomb of a man we knew had been buried there more than 200 years earlier.Dov Ber Birkenthal, an intrepid wine merchant and Jewish community leader, had been born in Bolekhiv -- known in Polish as Bolechow -- in 1723 and died there in 1805.His tombstone, I knew, bore an epitaph that paid tribute to a long, busy and eventful life -- it summed him up as "the learned, the renowned leader, the open-handed, the aged."
Birkenthal, generally referred to as Ber of Bolechow, has been one of my heroes since I was introduced to him through his remarkable autobiography more than 15 years ago. Ber is believed to have written his memoirs in 1799 or 1800, five years or so before his death. He described everything from local political and religious intrigue to how he drove hard business deals and suffered on the road during arduous wine-buying journeys to Hungary. He wrote of customs duties, currency fraud, and drunken wagon drivers; of icy rivers, double-dealing business partners, flea-ridden inns, and occasional attacks by roving bandits. One long, dramatic passage describes how bandits attacked Bolechow itself in 1759, robbing and looting, killing several people, and setting homes on fire. Some local residents gave as good as they got -- the town's wealthiest Jew, a man called Nachman, held off the attackers with a blazing firearm in each fist. Business was Ber's primary concern. But he also touched on his failed first marriage and the love he found with his second wife, Leah; the pride he felt in his children; his friendships with other Jews and non-Jews; and his passion for books and prowess in half a dozen languages. Ber, "was a remarkable man," wrote Daniel Mendelsohn in his best-selling 2006 book The Lost: a Search for Six of the Six Million, which describes Mendelsohn's quest to learn the fate of his own relatives from Bolekhiv who were killed in the Holocaust. "Ber was the son of a forward-thinking, broad-minded wine merchant who encouraged his son's precocious intellectual appetites from his earliest childhood -- even allowing the boy to study Greek and Latin with the local Catholic priests, an unheard of thing," he wrote. The precocious boy, Mendelsohn went on, "grew up to be a precocious man: a successful wine merchant but also a scholar of enormous breadth and depth, a man who could read easily in Polish and German and Italian, as well as in Hebrew and Greek and Latin." He was, he concluded, "a man who exemplified the liberal, worldly energies that helped to create the Haskalah, the great Jewish Enlightenment movement." I had been to Bolekhiv once before, in 2006, when I was researching the latest edition of my book, National Geographic Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern Europe.
On that visit, too, I had prowled through the cemetery trying to find Ber's grave. "Dov" (in Hebrew) and "Ber" (in Yiddish) both mean "Bear," and I did indeed discover a tombstone of someone named Dov Ber that was decorated with a particularly vivid carving of a bear and bunches of grapes, indicating involvement of the deceased in the wine trade.
Friday, March 27, 2009
Ukraine -- On the Road and Off the Beaten Track
RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- Jewish Heritage
Samorin synagogue, At H0me Gallery, 2009. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen GruberMy latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column is from the milestone Bratislava seminar on the care, conservation and maintenance of historic Jewish property.
March 26, 2009
By Ruth Ellen Gruber
BRATISLAVA, Slovakia (JTA) – The restitution of Jewish communal property in Central and Eastern Europe has been a hot-button issue since the Iron Curtain fell nearly 20 years ago.
But often forgotten amid the slow and painful legal battles to get back historic Jewish properties that were seized by the Nazis or nationalized by postwar Communist regimes is the practical and urgent need to care for, conserve and maintain the properties once they’ve been recovered.
For two decades and more, I've documented, written about and photographed these sites, which include many yeshivas and synagogues.
Many are huge. Many are dilapidated. Some are recognized as historic monuments. Most stand in towns where few, if any, Jews now live. Even basic maintenance can stretch already strapped communal resources.
In March, I joined Jewish community representatives from 15 countries who gathered to address these concerns at a seminar held in the Slovak capital, Bratislava.
The aim of the meeting was to foster networking and cross-border consultation and spark creative strategic thinking. Many participants had never met before and had little awareness of how colleagues in other countries were confronting similar challenges. Some knew little about the variety of Jewish heritage sites in other countries.
The meeting dealt with issues ranging from fundraising to roof repair to what Jewish law says about synagogue re-use.
During the seminar, which was organized by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the International Survey of Jewish Monuments and the Slovak Jewish Heritage Center, we visited several sites in the Bratislava area to see how some best-practice solutions had been implemented.
One was the former synagogue in Samorin, a small town southeast of Bratislava, built in 1912.
Back in the early 1990s, it was a derelict shell standing silent and empty on the outskirts of the shabby city center. Its lonely position and crumbling façade underscored its poignancy as a surviving relic of the devastated past.
Since then, it has undergone a dramatic transformation.
Owned by the Union of Slovak Jewish Communities, it is now held on a long-term lease by a couple who took over the building in 1995, restored it and transformed it into the At Home Gallery, a center for contemporary art.
The synagogue is used for cultural purposes aimed at the public at large. It even once hosted the Dalai Lama.
It also now forms part of a new tourism and educational trail called the Slovak Route of Jewish Heritage, which links about 20 historic Jewish sites around the country.
In restoring the building, Csaba Kiss and his Canadian-born wife, Suzanne, deliberately chose to retain evidence that the interior had been desecrated. The walls still bear painted decoration, but the paintings are faded and patchy; they have not been retouched or prettied up.
"Our idea was not to touch the walls," Kiss once told me. "They have memories; we can see them. It's special."
At the seminar's conclusion, participants agreed on a set of pragmatic guidelines with best-practice principles and procedures for the Jewish properties.
Jewish heritage, the guidelines state, "is the legacy of all aspects of Jewish history – religious and secular." At the same time, "Jewish history and art are part of every nation’s history and art. Jewish heritage is part of national heritage, too."
These assertions may appear to state the obvious, but given contentious internal Jewish politics and the taboos and prejudice that historically applied to Jewish culture in Europe, they actually articulate crucial basic concepts. And the guidelines as a whole, while non-binding, represent a milestone when it comes to restituted Jewish properties.
Addressing a frequently heard criticism of Jewish communal management style, the guidelines state, "Honesty and transparency are Jewish values and should be especially apparent in the handling of all matters concerning Jewish property." The guidelines urge detailed documentation of Jewish communal properties and heritage sites and underscore the need for openness and collaboration among Jewish and non-Jewish institutions.
Will these guidelines be followed? Probably not to the letter. Financial considerations, legal obstacles, local conditions and human nature, among other things, prevent adherence to ideals.
Still, they form a framework that can influence practice and, perhaps, finally bring these sites the maintenance and preservation they – and the Jewish people – need.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
My new column -- in Italian
Monument to the Holocaust, Buehl. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen GruberI've started writing a brief commentary/column for the web site of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities -- moked.it.
The editor asked me to "read" or "read into" one of my photographs -- or another image -- each week.
I started with a picture I took last month in Buehl, Germany (when I was there for a conference on Bluegrass Music) of the monument marking the spot where the synagogue stood before it was destroyed on Kristallnacht. Today, an Italian ice cream parlor stands there. I used the picture as a peg to discuss (very briefly) German commemoration of the Shoah.
Nel cuore di Buehl, una piccola città tedesca non lontano da Baden-Baden, si gusta gelato italiano sul posto dove per più di 110 anni sorgeva la sinagoga. Fra i tavolini davanti al "Eis-cafe Italia", così come in tante altre città e cittadine tedesche, un monumento molto semplice fa parte ormai dell'arredo urbano, che segna e forma il tessuto vivente del luogo. Memoria quotidiana, dunque. Memoria di oggigiorno (come i monumenti ai caduti di guerra che sono disseminati in ogni cittadina italiana). Per i curiosi, per chi si ferma a leggere, il monumento informa che fino al 10 novembre 1938, la famigerata Notte dei Cristalli, si trovava lì una sinagoga costruita in 1823. Sul suo sito web, lo Yad Vashem ha un filmato che mostra la sua distruzione. Il filmato fu girato da un pompiere, un vigile del fuoco, un amatore che girava i film per hobby. Secondo lo Yad Vashem, voleva "catturare il lavoro dei suoi collegi", mostrali mentre controllavano il fuoco in modo che distruggesse soltanto la sinagoga e non gli altri palazzi intorno. Un anno fa, parlando i occasione del Giorno della Memoria in Germania, l'ex ambasciatore di Israele Avi Primor si è posto una domanda: "Dove nel mondo si è mai vista una nazione che costruisce monumenti alla sua propria vergogna?".
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- Klezmer Music and the Ghost of Germany's past
Feb. 25, 2009
By Ruth Ellen Gruber
FREIBURG, Germany (JTA) -- At the height of the recent uproar over Pope Benedict XVI's rehabilitation of a Holocaust-denying bishop, I attended a klezmer concert in the pontiff's native Germany.
The timing was coincidental. I didn't deliberately set out to counter the pernicious folly of denying history by listening to music rooted in the culture the Nazis sought to destroy.
Still, the concert started me to thinking -- about what and how we remember; about what and how we forget; and about the role contemporary cultural expressions play in determining how we think about things.
I had been to many klezmer concerts in Germany in the past. The traditional music of East European Jews has had a wide following here since the 1980s, when American and other artists began to tour. Scores of homegrown klezmer bands have been formed, and several leading American Jewish music performers settled in Berlin or elsewhere in the country.
Germany's particular history, of course, played a role in the music's popularity.
Some Germans, especially those from older generations, became attracted as part of the manifold process of dealing with the Nazi legacy that is commonly known here as "working through the past."
For more youthful musicians and fans, however, the baggage of guilt is mostly absent. For some, the klezmer sound simply forms part of the eclectic exoticism of world music. For others, its rich cultural contexts provide stimulus for their own creative interpretation.
The group I saw this time was The Painted Bird, a Berlin-based band pointedly named for the Holocaust novel by Jerzy Kosinski. Known for making music with a sharp political edge, the band describes itself on its MySpace page as "Punk Cabaret + Radical Yiddish Song + Gothic American Folk + Klezmer Danse Macabre."
Its leader is Daniel Kahn, a 30-year-old Detroit native who forms part of the current wave of American Jewish musical transplants to the German capital.
The concert I attended was performed before a standing-room-only crowd in Freiburg, a university town in the southern part of the country.
Spotlighted on the stage and dressed in black, Kahn sang through a megaphone and switched between accordion, piano and ukelele as he chewed up stereotypes and spit them out in an almost in-your-face challenge to the audience.
Most of the songs were from the band's new CD, "Partisans and Parasites," a collection of original pieces and reworked Yiddish songs that deftly juggles genres, styles, epochs and languages.
Kahn's song "Parasites" tells of species that live on others who then sometimes kill them. His "Khurbn Katrina" mourns the destruction of New Orleans with a soulful mix of Yiddish and Bourbon Street. A beautifully reworked version of the Yiddish classic "Borscht" employs English translation to reveal a rollicking love song.
About halfway through the show, the band launched into its most notorious number, a deliberately provocative tune about the power and folly of revenge.
Called "Six Million Germans/Nakam," it recounts how East European Jewish partisans formed a group called Nakam -- Revenge -- that sought to avenge the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust by poisoning Germans’ bread and water.
The plot was foiled, and Nakam disbanded. Its leader, Abba Kovner, went on to become one of Israel's most noted poets.
"Six Million Germans! 6 Million Germans!" goes the chorus, chanted against the background of bouncy klezmer riffs combined with a spirited oompah march.
The audience seemed to love it.
"Ultimately, it's not about the absence of justice or victims," Kahn told me when we sat and talked after the show. "It's not about Jews and Germans; it's about revenge. It's about the sense of vengeance and whether or not that really has sense."
Kahn told me how history provided an inescapable background for his work.
"I think we're all doomed to repeat history whether we want to or not," Kahn said. "The question is, what part of history are we going to repeat? Even if you don't actively remember the past, the past is going to come and remind you of itself."
There was something "naively sort of quaint" about Holocaust denial, he added. But other forms of deliberate amnesia can also be destructive, Kahn said.
"It would be nice if we were the kind of animal that can't do these things to each other," he said. "But to deny that we did it then is to deny that we're doing it now. It's to deny a very real problem that humanity has to deal with, which is the problem of racism, fascism, dehumanization, collective punishment.
"We sing songs about this, about memory, about memory politics. But ultimately it's not only about do we remember or are we remembering or is there something to remember. It's what exactly are we supposed to not forget, what does 'never again' really mean.
"Is it 'never again' to us?" he asked. "Is it never forget this? We need to look again at what it is we're supposed to remember."
A few days before I saw The Painted Bird, the music critic of The Jewish Chronicle of London, Paul Lester, raised hackles in the Jewish music world by slamming what he called "the fake roots music of the klezmer brigade."
"The best Jewish music -- or rather, the best music by Jews -- reflects the moment and is somehow a response to the times in which it was made," Lester wrote. "And if there is a 'Jewish voice,' it is not to be heard in klezmer, maybe because it is being drowned out by all those clarinets, violins and accordions."
The "Jewish voice" he was seeking, Lester wrote, was "urbane, witty, sharp, smart, savvy, often satirical and thoroughly contemporary. It also has an American accent."
To my ears, that's a pretty good description of The Painted Bird.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- Farewell to a Pintele Yid
By Ruth Ellen Gruber
BUDAPEST (JTA) -- The Yiddish expression "dos pintele Yid" is often translated as "the Jewish spark" -- an indestructible core of Jewishness that lurks deep within even unknowing or alienated Jews, ready to spring back to life at any unexpected moment.
The Forward's language maven, Philologos, once devoted a column to the term, describing it as an almost mystical notion.
"It posits that all Jews, even if they are unaware of it or have been raised so un-Jewishly that they do not know they are Jewish, have within them a Jewish essence that can be activated under certain circumstances," Philologos wrote.
Henryk Halkowski, who died suddenly on New Year's Day in his native Krakow, Poland, may have been one of the least mystical people I ever knew, but in many ways he embodied this concept.
A writer, translator and local historian, Henryk was like a pintele Yid for an entire city -- a city whose Jewish population of more than 65,000 had been all but wiped out in the Shoah. A city where only some 200 or so Jews live today.
To my mind, Henryk was one of the most noteworthy personalities in the new Jewish reality that has emerged in Poland since the Iron Curtain came down nearly 20 years ago.
"He was a guardian of Krakow's Jewish legacy," said Joachim Russek, director of the city's Center for Jewish Culture.
Born in 1951 into the echoing vacuum of post-Holocaust Poland, Henryk was haunted by the ghosts of Krakow's Holocaust dead and the generations of Krakow Jews who went before them.
He, in turn, haunted Jewish Krakow, learning its secrets and becoming so intimately attached that he seemed to have real, psychological difficulty leaving the city even for a few days.
"He was a character," said Stanislaw Krajewski, a leader in Poland's Jewish revival and the American Jewish Committee representative in Warsaw. "He was so Cracovian -- a Krakow curiosity."
With his encyclopedic knowledge of Krakow's Jewish history, culture, legend and lore, Henryk became a touchstone for me and other Jewish foreigners who began trickling in to Krakow in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
"For many of us, Henryk Halkowski was one of our first significant encounters with Krakow, and for all the years thereafter he remained a fixture of its character as much as any other person or institution," said Michael Traison, an American lawyer who has worked for years in Poland and sponsored many projects aimed at preserving Jewish heritage and fostering Jewish revival.
A stocky figure with thick glasses and a gray-flecked beard, Henryk was a familiar figure in Krakow's Jewish quarter, Kazimierz, where he roamed the streets with a restless energy.
"Wherever one walked in Kazimierz, regardless of the time of day or night, you couldn't help but run into him, then have a drink, then have a meal," recalled the klezmer musician and filmmaker Yale Strom, who met Halkowski in 1984 and featured him in several of his documentaries.
I first met Halkowski in the early 1990s.
Back then Kazimierz was a slum, a dilapidated ghost town that still showed the scars of Nazi mass murder and communist oppression.
Henryk, as head of a Jewish club, had formed the nucleus of a group of younger Jews who had attempted to revive Yiddish culture in the 1980s.
He recalled to me how foreign Jews often seemed uncomfortable meeting younger Jews in Poland -- how they couldn't understand their desire, or need, to remain.
"American Jews have a stereotype about Polish Jews who stayed here," he told me. "It's as if we are seen as 'traitors' to the nation."
In the years since then, Kazimierz has grown into a lively tourist center, with Jewish-style cafes, renovated synagogues, kitschy souvenirs and constantly milling tour groups.
The district has a resident rabbi and a Chabad center, and there is a plethora of Jewish cultural and educational institutions -- even a local Jewish publishing house, which has brought out Henryk's own books.
Henryk was an acute observer of the transformation, even as he became one of its protagonists.
"Disheveled and in disarray, he never disappointed as he cynically critiqued the absurdity of the Disneyland display of Jewish heritage and tragedy," Traison said.
"Orally and through his writings, he offered a sincere and unique insight into Cracovian culture and specifically that special Kazimierz life created since the fall of communism.
"Henryk remained and remains a genuine part of that milieu," he said. "And if one word is needed to describe him that is it: genuine."
In 1997 I took a picture of Henryk, a wry grin on his face, as he posed a trifle awkwardly at a Krakow souvenir stall selling T-shirts and carved wooden figures of Jews.
"Shall I tell you my obsession?" he asked me once, as he tucked into a bowl of chicken soup and kreplach at one of Kazimierz's trendy new Jewish-style restaurants.
"What we need in Kazimierz is some sort of institution that presents Jewish life as it really was here. What an apartment was like, for example; what a cheder was like, what a workshop was like. How the people here really lived. Something to inject a bit of reality into the gentrification."
Henryk was buried in Krakow's Jewish cemetery. Some 300 people braved the snow and bitter cold to pay their last respects. Rabbis and cafe keepers alike mourned at the graveside.
I could not make the trip to attend. But I remembered what Henryk had told me years ago, during one of our earliest conversations.
"Kazimierz," he said, "can be a place where meaning can be materialized."
That still holds true. But it simply won't be the same without him.
Read Full Story on JTA
Monday, January 19, 2009
Letter from Rome: The Expatriate Vote
I'm linking to a PDF of the piece, as unfortunately the New Leader does not have an interactive web site.
The New Leader
November/December, 2008
ROME
In early September I had lunch with Mr. and Mrs. X, American acquaintances who live year-round in Italy. They are a well-off, well-educated couple who retired some years ago to a beautiful home in the rolling hills of Umbria. It was still two months until November, but as for most Americans (and many non-Americans) I know, the upcoming Presidential election weighed heavily on my mind.
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Tuesday, January 13, 2009
IHT Article -- Zhovkva, Ukraine
FOR A FORTRESS TOWN, A SECOND RENAISSANCE
BY RUTH ELLEN GRUBER
Jan. 12, 2009
In Renaissance Italy, artists and master architects theorized that the ideal proportions for a city could be derived from those of the human form. Some even made drawings superimposing town plans onto the bodies of men.
Half a millennium later, Lubomyr Kravets, the director of the tourist office in the little town of Zhovkva, just north of L'viv, unfolded a local map to show me how that theory had been put into practice here in western Ukraine.
"See" he said, pointing. "Zhovkva looks like a human body. The castle here is the head, and the big church over this way is the heart. The four entrance gates in the town walls were the arms and legs."
Zhovkva was founded in 1594 as a private fortress town by the Polish military commander Stanislaw Zolkiewski. It was one of several fortified towns in what was then the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that were conceived as "ideal cities" and built by architects and master masons from Italy.
The most famous, and best preserved, is Zamosc, across the border in Poland, which was founded in 1580 by the powerful Polish noble Jan Zamoyski and designed by the Padua-born architect Bernardo Morando. It is included on Unesco's roster of world cultural heritage as "a perfect example of a late-16th-century Renaissance town."
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