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

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

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

By RUTH ELLEN GRUBER  

Published: June 15, 2011


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

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

The replica, which will be 85 percent of the original size of the building, will be installed as one of the key components of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, currently under construction in Warsaw and scheduled to open in 2013.

Its elaborate structure and the intricate painted decoration on the cupola ceiling will reproduce a form of architectural and artistic expression that was wiped out in World War II, when the Nazis put the torch to some 200 wooden synagogues in Eastern Europe. Many of them, like that in Gwozdziec, were centuries old and extraordinarily elaborate, with tiered roofs and richly decorative interior painting.

The Gwozdziec Synagogue, built in the 17th and 18th centuries, was a “truly resplendent synagogue that exemplified a high point in Jewish architectural art and religious painting,” the architectural historian Thomas C. Hubka, an expert on the building, has written.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See the story on the web site by clicking HERE

Ruthless Cosmopolitan -- Never Better in Krakow?

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."

Can umbrella groups hold Jewish Europe together?

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

By Ruth Ellen Gruber
(May 10, 2011)

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ECJC is at the heart of the recent polemics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whether this will work remains to be seen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Berlusconi article

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

With Berlusconi tottering, Israel-Italy ties appear safe

By Ruth Ellen Gruber · December 7, 2010

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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