"Oral Tradition is the most valuable of our possessions and if we don't lose it, no one can take it away from us." And so says Giovanni Savino.
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| Photo © Eman Helal-All Rights Reserved |
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| Picture from www.handshouse.org |
Wooden Synagogues of Poland An Exhibition: "A Lost World Revisited"
"Wooden Synagogues: A Lost World Revisited" is an exhibition about the 17th and 18th century wooden synagogues from the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth with a particular focus on the Zabludow and Gwozdziec Synagogues.
These magnificent buildings were destroyed during the Nazi invasion of Poland in World War II. Fortunately, an extensive collection of architectural drawings and photographic documentation has survived in several Polish archives. The exhibition displays reproductions of this historic documentation as well as scale models of the buildings themselves. Through this exhibition, the public will gain an understanding and appreciation of the architectural significance of the wooden synagogues and the nearly lost cultural heritage of the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe.
The exhibition is a collaboration between Handshouse Studio and Tom Hubka, professor of Architecture and author of Resplendent Synagogue: Architecture and Worship in an Eighteenth Century Polish Community.Exhibition Contents
The exhibit includes six large scale B&W prints of photographs of the interior of Gwozdziec Synagogue; a large 1/2 scale colored painted replica of a portion of the Gwozdziec Synagogue ceiling and wall painting; a large-scale wooden model of the Zabludow Synagogue; reproductions of drawings (mostly produced by faculty and students from the Institute of Polish Architecture of the Polytechnic of Warsaw in 1920s and 1930s); and photographs of 14 additional synagogues along with descriptions of their Polish Jewish communities. There is also a full scale replica of a hewn timber framed brace, the roof truss and log wall connection from the Zabludow Synagogue structure.
During the period between the two world wars, the approximately 3.5 million Jews living in the Polish Republic constituted the largest Jewish community in the world outside of the United States. The Jews of Poland had a tradition of many centuries of peaceful existence alongside the other inhabitants – Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Belarusians, Germans, Armenians, Gypsies – creating a culture of richness and diversity. During the Nazi invasion of Poland and the Holocaust, this part of Poland's cultural richness was lost. Over two hundred wooden synagogues were completely destroyed and only through photographs, drawings and documentation compiled before the war are we able to envision a handful of the hundreds of synagogues that once existed. A common misconception is that the Polish Jewish communities who built wooden synagogues were blighted by poverty. This image may be an appropriate 19th and 20th century description, but Zabludow and similar synagogues from the 17th and 18th centuries were built by cosmopolitan, relatively affluent communities who could afford the highest regional standards of construction and craftsmanship. These wooden synagogues are an extraordinary phenomenon, worthy of high artistic standing among the wooden architecture of Europe and the world. They represent a high point in Jewish architectural art and religious painting, a tradition that was later abandoned by Eastern European Jews. This gives greater importance to the study of the subject. Today, these historic wooden synagogues remain only in the memories of a handful of survivors and in the limited but significant documentation. [...] The image of the impoverished shtetl is an appropriate 19th and 20th century description but these buildings are monuments of the 17th and 18th century, a time referred to by some scholars as "a golden age" of shtetl Jewish history. These wooden synagogues were built by cosmopolitan, relatively affluent communities who could afford the highest regional standards of construction and craftsmanship. Conforming to the style of that period, wooden synagogues were an extraordinary architectural phenomenon, worthy of high artistic standing among the wooden architecture of Europe and the world. |
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| Tyler Hicks In Libya Photo © John Moore/Getty Images-All Rights Reserved |
From the pickup, Lynsey saw a body outstretched next to our car, one arm outstretched. We still don’t know whether that was Mohammed. We fear it was, though his body has yet to be found.Mohamed was the Libyan driver who had been driving the four when captured by the pro-Qaddafi military, and there's no news of his fate.
If he died, we will have to bear the burden for the rest of our lives that an innocent man died because of us, because of wrong choices that we made, for an article that was never worth dying for.
No article is, but we were too blind to admit that.
The Ithaca Area United Jewish Community will present “Empty Spaces/Bold New Realities: Jewish Culture in Today’s Europe,” a lecture from author and journalist Ruth Ellen Gruber, on Sunday, March 27, from 3:30-5:30 pm, at the Women’s Community Building, 100 W. Seneca St. in downtown Ithaca. The event will include a musical interlude by the Cornell University Klezmer Ensemble and a book signing by Gruber. Refreshments will be served. The event will be free and open to the public.
In Europe, 65 years since the end of World War II and since the fall of Communism, there are empty synagogues and abandoned cemeteries. However, there is also a new Jewish reality. Gruber is an expert on the impact of the Holocaust as a backdrop in today’s Europe. An award-winning American writer and photographer, she is a witness to the burgeoning European forms of Jewish religious and cultural expression, where few if any Jews live today.
During her presentation, Gruber will focus on the changes in Jewish life since the fall of Communism and compare them with conditions as she found them throughout the past decades. She will provide an illustrated exploration of the re-emergence and popularity of Jewish culture, and will discuss new Jewish youth trends that blend old traditions with today’s culture. Additionally, she will describe the “virtually Jewish” world of “shtetl chic, klezmer cafes and kitschy souvenirs.”
For more than two decades, Gruber has chronicled Jewish cultural developments and other contemporary European Jewish issues. She coined the term “Virtually Jewish” to describe the way the “Jewish space” in Europe is often filled by non-Jews. Her books include “National Geographic Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern Europe,” “Letters from Europe (and Elsewhere),” “Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe” and “Upon the Doorposts of Thy House: Jewish Life in East-Central Europe, Yesterday and Today.”
Gruber is the senior European correspondent for the Jewish Telegraph Agency. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Tablet Magazine, Hadassah Magazine and many other publications. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and three Simon Rockower Awards for excellence in Jewish journalism. Gruber was recently a scholar-in-residence at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute.
The Ithaca Area United Jewish Community is a volunteer organization dedicated to educational and humanitarian efforts both locally and globally. Donations to the IAUJC in support of its work will be accepted at the door.
From the PBS NewHour blog: Photographer John Moore is no stranger to combat. As a member of an Associated Press team in 2005, he shared a Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography for coverage of the war in Iraq and he's done extended stints in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, South Africa, Mexico and Nicaragua and elsewhere in the last 20 years.
Yet despite his relative comfort with being on the frontlines, Moore told the NewsHour from his hotel room in Cairo that his latest assignment -a six-week trip that took him to the uprisings in Egypt, Bahrain and Libya - might have been his most dangerous. Moore recorded the interview for us after sneaking out of Benghazi, Libya en route back to his home in Denver.
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| Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved |
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| Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved |
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| Georgetown, Penang. Photo © David Hagerman/NYT-All Rights Reserved |
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