Latest Centropa column -- Budapest

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

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

Budapest's Seventh District Wakes Up

By Ruth Ellen Gruber


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

          Read Full Article

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- Il Duce online

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

 iMussolini app flap restirs debate on Il Duce’s legacy

By Ruth Ellen Gruber · February 21, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Others see it quite differently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's a little creepy.

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

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

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

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

Read the story on JTA

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- Riffing on the Swiss minaret ban

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

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN
Swiss minaret ban recalls synagogue bans of past eras

By Ruth Ellen Gruber · December 14, 2009


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- Arson attack on synagogue in Crete

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

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN
Attack on Crete synagogue carries special meaning

By Ruth Ellen Gruber · January 13, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What was at stake, Brostoff wrote, was "the way we choose to see the past, a struggle between a dispassionate approach relying on facts and figures and another, much more subjective one that holds survivors' testimonies to be unarguably true and ultimately sacred."

Anti-Semitic violence is anything but dispassionate.

The bar of soap hurled against the desecrated synagogue in Hania was a diabolically mixed metaphor: Soap usually symbolizes purity and godliness, but in this twisted context it spelled hatred and death.

The attack on the Hania synagogue was not just an assault on a building. It was an assault on the ideals that had transformed the structure from a wrecked relic of Holocaust destruction to a new symbol of community and compassion.

This transformation was accomplished largely through the efforts of Stavroulakis, a remarkable man who has devoted much of the past two decades to restoring a Jewish presence to a city made "Judenrein" by the Nazis.

I met Stavroulakis when I visited Hania in 1996. An artist, author and scholar who had co-founded and directed the Jewish Museum in Athens, Stavroulakis had returned to live in his family's rambling house in Hania after many years away.

The synagogue, which dates back to the 15th century, was in ruin. But over the next three years Stavroulakis made it his mission to raise funds and, with the help of the World Monuments Fund and other donors, oversee the building's rebirth. His aim was to make it a living spiritual presence, not simply a restored reminder of the past.

The synagogue now functions as a museum, and it hosts exhibitions and cultural events.

It’s also an active house of worship. A small Havurah community whose members include Christians and some Muslims -- as well as Jews of all persuasions -- regularly assembles there to celebrate Shabbat and Jewish holidays.

Stavroulakis himself leads daily prayers each morning, whether a minyan is present or not.

Prayers were held as usual at 9 a.m. Jan. 6, the morning after the arson attack. The fire had gutted a stairway, wreaked havoc on the synagogue library, and covered walls and precious furnishings with a thick layer of soot.

"Fortunately," Stavroulakis said, "the fabric of the synagogue was and is intact."

He was referring to the physical structure of the building, but I think he also meant that the symbolic identity of the synagogue also had survived -- and would be maintained.

"We must be angry over what has happened to our synagogue," he told the small group of worshipers gathered for prayers amid the soot. "If we were not, it would be an indication that we were either indifferent or morally numb."

But, Stavroulakis asked, just where should the anger be directed? Local indifference and the ignorance that promotes racism had to be addressed.

"We have tried at Etz Hayyim to be a small presence in the midst of what is at times almost aggressive ignorance," he wrote on the synagogue blog. "We have done this to such a degree that our doors are open from early in the morning until late in the day so that the synagogue assumes its role as a place of prayer, recollection and reconciliation."

There is, Stavroulakis wrote, little if any sign of overt security.

"This character of the synagogue must not change and the doors must remain open," he wrote. If not, that means "we have given in to the ignorance that has perpetrated this desecration."

A week after the attack, the Etz Hayyim blog posted pictures showing that thanks in large part to volunteers, the walls of the sanctuary already had been painted and other clean-up work was well under way.

"The impact of this [attack] will be wider than simply an act of terrorism against Jews," Stavroulakis told me. "Already it is being seen in a much wider social context that has to do with civic responsibility and care."

Tablet Magazine -- Olive Oil

Here's a link to my Hanukkah story in Tablet Magazine, on the olive oil harvest...

My Hanukkah Gift
A writer’s reflections on her olive grove and a holiday ritual

By Ruth Ellen Gruber. December 17, 2009


It’s surely just a coincidence that in Italy, where I have a home, the olive harvest generally takes place in the month or so before the most oil-centered of Jewish holidays.

For me, though, the olive harvest and subsequent production of oil provide a parallel seasonal ritual, in which bruschetta, or grilled bread drenched in dense new oil, provides the ceremonial flavor.

My family and I have property in an olive-producing area of Umbria, in central Italy, where the landscape is a hilly mix of forest and farmland, and many of the slopes are covered with groves of olive trees.

Umbria is home to several big olive oil concerns, with huge groves comprising thousands of trees. But many people, like me, have small private holdings that provide enough oil for their own needs, as well as a portion left over for sale.

On our land, we have several dozen olive trees. I keep most of them pruned, but otherwise, I admit, I’m a very poor farmer. I don’t plow or fertilize or do much else to care for them; I regard what they produce as something of a gift, and only about half of the trees, in fact, bear fruit.

Still, each November sees me out in the field, gathering olives and then having them taken to a local frantoio, or olive press, where they are turned into oil.

Read full story

Sturm , Twang, and Sauerkraut Cowboys -- article in The Western Way

The Western Way magazine has published a much shorter version of the lengthy essay/paper on European country music that I wrote with the aid of my Guggenheim Fellowship and NEH grant, and presented at the International Country Music Conference in Nashville last year (and in other venues).
A full version of the essay, with pictures, can be viewed by clicking HERE.

 

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- 20 Years Ago Today....

 Prague -- early 1990s. A sausage stand under the entrance to a disused synagogue. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Here's my latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column, on looking back to the Way It Was before the Wall came down....

A sea change in 20 years

By Ruth Ellen Gruber· November 10, 2009

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN

ROME (JTA) -- The English author L.P. Hartley once wrote that "The past is a foreign country: They do things differently there."

That's how I feel whenever I look back at the way that the world -- in particular, the Jewish world in Central and Eastern Europe -- worked before the collapse of communism 20 years ago.

The changes triggered when the Berlin Wall came down have, of course, produced a host of new and complex challenges that Jews in Europe have had to confront.

But as Robert Djerassi, a leader of the Bulgarian Jewish community, put it recently, "When I think back to Socialist days, even everyday experiences sound so improbable and grotesque that it's hard sometimes to convince people who didn't live through them that they actually took place."

I lived and worked as a journalist in communist countries from the late 1970s onward, first as a correspondent for United Press International and then as an independent reporter, for JTA and others, as well as the author of several books on the region.

It was in the late 1980s that I began dedicating much of my writing to Jewish subjects, just as communism was collapsing and new democratic freedoms allowed Jews to reassert and reclaim their identity and forge a new beginning in what before the Holocaust had been Europe's Jewish heartland.

Under communism in most countries in the region, the practice of Judaism and the expression of Jewishness were semi-clandestine, almost secret, almost taboo.

Leaders of the remnant Jewish communities in these countries were beholden to the regime and generally toed the party line. Less than a year after the fall of communism, the rabbi in Prague was forced to resign after admitting that he had been a police informer under the communists.

All communist states except Romania had broken ties with Israel after the Six-Day War in 1967. And in most countries Jewish practice and education, even the study of Hebrew, was strictly limited or even barred.

In Prague, for example, the scholarly publication of what was then the State Jewish Museum was published in English and French and other languages -- but not in Czech, in order to limit access by local people.

And many Jews I interviewed were unwilling to speak to me on the record, even on a subject such as the restoration of a monument to victims of the Holocaust.

"We had to get authorization from the authorities to speak with foreign visitors, and then afterward we had to write out reports on our conversations, whether it be with visiting scholars, journalists or whatever," a Prague Jewish museum curator told me in 1990. "It was the pressure of a totalitarian regime."

In Warsaw in the early 1980s, I was part of a group called the Jewish Flying University that consisted of young Jews and non-Jews who tried to teach themselves -- on their own -- Jewish ritual, tradition, history and culture. The group "flew" from apartment to apartment for meetings.

Western Jews like myself were conduits to the outside world, despite the limits of our knowledge.

"You're a real Jew," they told me, even though I don't keep kosher, go to services much or speak Hebrew. "You've known all your life that you are Jewish."

November 1989 saw a climax of change in Eastern Europe that had been coming for months.

Already that summer a negotiated settlement in Poland had led to free elections. And in September, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee had officially returned to Hungary after 36 years, and Hungary and Israel had resumed formal diplomatic relations.

Nov. 12 of that year found me in Prague sitting with a small group of eager yet anxious Jews in the top floor function room of the historic Jewish Town Hall. The Berlin Wall had come down three days earlier, but the Velvet Revolution that ousted the communist regime in Prague was still five days away.

We were there to meet with Edgar Bronfman, then president of the World Jewish Congress, who was making his first official visit to the country.

I saw fear and hope -- and also excitement -- on people's faces.

"The winds of freedom are blowing across the world like a gale," Bronfman declared. "I don't like to use the word 'democracy,' but prefer to say that there is a new era dawning on everyone that people won't be governed without their consent."

He went on, "It is important that the Jewish people in Eastern Europe are beginning to feel closer together. It is heartbreakingly sad that there are so few Jews left, [but] the Jewish world will go from strength to strength. We have a mission -- to teach others the way of the Lord."

Bronfman concluded: "Freedom is blowing, blowing for all of us."

It was an emotional moment at the cusp of the unknown: If the past is a foreign country, so is the future.

Read story at JTA.org