Monuments and Memorials

The site of the Warsaw Ghetto, with Ghetto monument in background. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

The site in front of the Ghetto Monument of the about-to-be-built Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Memorials to the Holocaust and to the Jewish communities destroyed in the Shoah are among the sites of Jewish heritage and memory in Europe that receive the most visitors.

I want to draw attention to two particularly thoughtful essays by Sam Gruber about their design, purpose and impact.

One is about what's missing from the Holocaust memorial in Bratislava, Slovakia. (Answer? Any information to inform the visitor what it is about.)

The other is about the complexity and changing style and emphasis of Holocaust monuments and memory in Warsaw, focuses on the Ghetto Monument, erected in 1948, the monument at Umschlagplatz, erected in 1991, and the planned new Museum of the History of Polish Jewry.

Poland -- Upcoming commemorative and cultural events

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

In Poland, there may be only 15,000 (or so) Jews -- but the summer months are filled with Jewish culture and heritage events. This year is no exception.

From big Jewish culture festivals, to individual commemorative events marking sites of Jewish heritage, much is going on. Some are sponsored by local civic organizations, some by committed local activists, some by the Israel embassy, some by local Jewish communities and Jewish organizations -- and some by a combination of organizers and funders who work together on the projects.

This month will see at least two commemorative events.

This Sunday, June 14, a ceremony will take place in the little town of Brzostek to memorialize the destroyed Jewish community there. It will formally rededicate the Jewish cemetery, which has been newly fenced put in order, and also unveil a Hebrew-language monument. In the course of restoring the cemetery, some 30 old tombstones, which have come to light in recent years, were re-erected. In addition, a plaque will be dedicated in the town center -- in Polish and English -- in memory of the former Jewish residents of the town. The project is being carried out in full co-operation with both the chief rabbi of Poland, Michael Schudrich, and the Brzostek town council.

Rabbis and local dignitaries will attend the ceremony, as will pupils from local schools.

"The town is regarding it as a major civic event and organizing various exhibitions on Brzostek's Jewish history," writes Connie Webber, the head of the Littman Library Jewish publishing house, said in an email. "Everyone with a Brzostek connection is invited to participate. Buses will be arranged to and from Krakow on the Sunday, and arrangements have been made for kosher food to be available both on the Sunday and for the preceding Shabbat in Krakow."

Connie and her husband, the scholar Jonathan Webber -- who family stems from Brzostek -- have been instrumental in organizing the commemoration.

Just one week later, on June 22, a plaque commemorating the former Scheinbach Synagogue building (today the town library) will be unveiled in Przemysl, in the far southeast of Poland on the border with Ukraine. Participating will be guests from Poland and abroad. The plaque is a joint initiative of the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland and Michael Freund of Raanana in Israel.

Located at ul. Slowackiego 15, the synagogue was built for the Reform community in 1886-1890 and was designed by Marceli Pilecki. (Another synagogue in the town, built in 1909, stands abandoned and falling ever more into ruin on Plac Unii Brzeskiej, in the Zasanie district across the river. There is a large Jewish cemetery next to the main municipal cemetery, with tombs from the 19th and 20th centuries.)
(Synagogue photo fodz.pl)

As for Jewish culture festivals -- everyone knows about the big Krakow Jewish Culture Festival -- but a a number of others are in the works in Poland. They include:

Gdansk -- 10th Baltic Days of Jewish Culture. June 14-15

Bialystok -- 2nd Zachor Festival of Jewish Culture. June 15-16

Chmielnik -- VII Meeting with Jewish Culture, June 19-21

Krakow -- Festival of Jewish Culture, June 27-July 5. The Other Europeans concert will be July 3.

Warsaw -- Singer's Warsaw Festival of Jewish Culture, Aug. 29-Sept. 6. A big festival, increasingly similar in scope to that in Krakow.

Lodz -- Festival of the Dialogue of Four Cultures. Usually in September

For an ever-growing list of Jewish festivals in all parts of Europe, check the link in the side bar of this blog!

Poland -- Dzialoszyce, commemoration, pilgrimage, travel

Ruth in Dzialoszyce, 2006. Photo: Jack Sal

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Pilgrimage and commemoration form important components of Jewish travel in eastern and central Europe. In fact, in Poland in particular, few Jews visited in the post-war communist period for any other purpose.

There were -- and still are -- strictly religious pilgrimages to the tombs of great rabbis. These are facilitated now by new infrastructure including kosher food services and accommodation.

Commemorative pilgrimages to death camps and other Holocaust-related sites also still draw thousands of people each year. More than half a million people visit Auschwitz alone. Here too infrastructure has changed radically, enabling the experience to educate about the Shoah and about the Jewish communities that were destroyed, rather than to focus them on mourning and commemoration.

At Auschwitz, among other things, the Auschwitz Jewish Center, which opened in 2000 in the surviving synagogue in the town of Oswiecim, focuses on the life in a town that before World War II was a majority Jewish town.

Before Auschwitz became the ultimate symbol of the Holocaust, it was just an ordinary Polish town known as Oswiecim. The majority of its citizens were Jewish. Generations of merchants, rabbis, doctors, and lawyers raised families here and contributed to a richly textured Jewish culture. Jews worked, married, studied and worshipped, cared for their families, and served the community. The tragedy of Holocaust suddenly ended the centuries-old Jewish life of the town.

The Center facilities include the Jewish Museum, Chevra Lomdei Mishnayot Synagogue, and Education Center. The Center’s exhibitions and programs are open to visitors and students from around the world. Dedicated to public education, the Center’s programs teach about the richness of pre-war Jewish life in Oswiecim and build awareness of the dangers of xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and the other forms of intolerance.

The Center's current exhibition is on Jewish survivors from Oswiecim who now live in Israel.

New forms of commemorative pilgrimage increasingly involve bridge-building between Jews and local Poles.

The filmmaker Menachem Daum led such a trip last month -- accompanying a group of students and two Holocaust survivors from Lost Angeles to Dzialoszyce, Poland, where they commemorated Holocaust victims but also met with local students and town officials.

On May 15th, 2009 a group of Jewish high school seniors from the Shalhevet School in Los Angeles, accompanied by two Holocaust survivors, were greeted in Dzialoszyce by Polish students and teachers from the local high school as well as by students from Krakow's Jagiellonian University. The group marched together to the ruins of the town's once magnificent synagogue where they were addressed in Polish by one of the survivors. They also learned that the synagogue had housed a voluntary kitchen that the community operated with great sacrifice in order to keep thousands from starving during the Nazi occupation. The town's Mayor greeted the group and promised to shore up the synagogue ruins so they do not collapse. The group also paid their respects at the monument near the mass grave of over 1,500 Jews shot during the deportation on September 3rd, 1942. Finally, the group ascended the hill to the Jewish cemetery. Although there are no longer any tombstones or a wall, this site is sacred because of the thousands of Dzialoszyce Jews buried there. The final prayers of the Jews of Dzialoszyce at this cemetery were recalled and the shofar was again sounded, as it had been 67 earlier. The ceremony ended with Poles and Jews affixing symbolic tombstones to the trees that now cover the cemetery .

Menachem posted the following video on Youtube:




The synagogue still stands crumbling, and physically it all looks much the same. But what a difference in attitude this represents from the first time I visited Dzialozyce, in 1990. I wrote about that visit in the New York Times in October of that year in my first major article about Jewish travel in Poland, "Visiting the Vestiges of Jewish Poland."

An elderly woman, her face as brown and wrinkled as a walnut, approached us one day last June as we stood gazing at the yawning roofless wreck that was once the synagogue in Dzialoszyce, a sleepy village 30 miles or so northeast of Cracow in southern Poland.

''Do you speak Jewish?'' she asked in Polish, and mumbled a few words of Yiddish.

It's been a long time, she apologized; she's forgotten almost everything she knew of the language.

The woman came with us - three Americans and two Polish experts on synagogue architecture - as we inspected the battered masonry shell. Children lounging around a bumper car and video arcade in front of the ruin stared as we passed; a few of them joined us, too.

Built in 1852 according to a neo-classical design by Felicjan Frankowski, the synagogue is an impressive monument to the destruction of a people.

Before the Holocaust, Dzialoszyce was a Jewish town: in 1939, 7,000 of its 10,000 inhabitants were Jews. The synagogue would have been magnificent, with its tall arched windows and sculpted outer decorations. But all that remains of a frescoed interior is a few patches of flaking blue paint.

Later, the old woman and the children escorted us beyond the edge of the village, to the site of the Jewish cemetery, destroyed by the Nazis. A simple white monument, erected Sept. 1, 1989, on the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the war, commemorates the thousands of Jews who were slaughtered here in mass graves or deported to Nazi death camps.

''I used to work for the rabbi here before the war,'' the old woman confided. ''I will never forget what he told me. He said that when the birds go away from here, the Jews will go away too. One year, there were no birds. And after that . . .''

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Jewish War Memorials

In honor of Memorial Day in the United States, Sam Gruber has posted pictures on his blog of war memorials to Jewish soldiers who fell while fighting for their (varied) countries in Europe....

Like Sam, I, too, have long been intrigued by these memorials and the stories that they tell -- at least the stories that they hint at. When you see a memorial in a Jewish cemetery in Germany, honoring Jewish soldiers who died fighting for Germany in World War I, a conflict that ended just 20 years before Kristallnacht and the start of the Holocaust, it does make you think.

Last week, in Bielsko-Biala, Poland, I photographed the World War I memorial in the town's Jewish cemetery.

Bielsko-Biala, 2009. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

The Israeli political scientist Sholmo Avinieri, who was born in Bielsko-Biala and who has restored the tombs of his grandparents in the cemetery, told me that the list of names included those of three Muslims -- two Bosniak Austrian soldiers (Dedo Karahodic and Bego Turonowicz), and one Muslim Russian prisoner of war (Chabibulin Chatybarachman) who died in an adjacent POW camp. "Who would bury them if not the Jews?" Shlomo commented.

One of the most poignant such War Memorials is in the wonderful, and historic, Jewish cemetery in Mikulov, Czech Republic -- it was founded in the 15th century and has about 4,000 tombstones. The oldest legible dates from 1605.

The World War I memorial honors 25 Jewish soldiers. "Oh, how the heroes have been cut down!" it reads, in German. The names of the dead include Moriz Jung, Max Fedsberger, Heinrich Deutsch, Hans Kohn, Emil Spitzer...

Mikulov. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Mikulov. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Contemporary Art Project Memorializes Shoah Victims in Prague

From Czech Radio comes a story about a new public art and memorial project in Prague's historic Jewish quarter. It is part of a "Stones of the Vanished" or "Stumbling Stones" project that originated in Germany and has seen similar monuments projects in a number of cities, most of them in Germany. According to the web site, after Prague an installation is also slated for another Czech town, Kolin.


Holocaust victims remembered by new ‘Stones of the Vanished’ project


By Rosie Johnston

If you stumble across a little brass plaque on a walk in Prague’s Old Town next week, then the chances are it is going to be a ‘kámen zmizelého’ (‘stone of the vanished’). The project, organized by the Czech Union of Jewish Students, will eventually see stones commemorating victims of the Holocaust embedded in pavements all over the capital. The idea comes from Germany, as does the man making the memorials, Gunter Demnig. But the project coordinator at the Czech end is Petr Mandl.

I met him on Wednesday morning to ask first about the name of the project:

“I would translate it as ‘The Stones of the Vanished’, the original name is ‘Stolpersteine’ in German, which means rather ‘stumbling stones’, but it is very hard to translate, and the meaning of the project is a bit different in the Czech Republic.”

So is this part of a European network of ‘Stolpersteine’ then? How big is the scale of this Czech project?

“So of course, we wanted Prague to be part of this international project – as you know, it has already been done in many other European countries. And now in Prague we are unveiling our first ten stones, and we want the project to enlarge by around 30 stones per year.”

And I hear that you are actually going to have to look quite hard to find these stones - that they are not going to be all that evident at first glance…

“One of the ideas of the project is to personify the historical event that was the Shoah, the Holocaust. We want to reflect the stories of people who were murdered in its course. So of course, the stones can’t be massive and all down the pavements, on every corner.”

So, if you were going to hunting for these stones, where would you find the first ten?

“Well, the first stones will be put in the Old Town, in the Jewish Quarter, where many Jewish people lived. But in the future, the majority of Jewish people in Prague lived in Vinohrady, and so there will be many stones there as well.”
Photo: www.stolpersteine.comWho is funding this project?

“It is funded by private sponsors and donors, and also those people who want to dedicate a stone to their family share the cost.”

The project is being unveiled later this month, so there aren’t yet any stones in place, but what will they look like, for those who maybe won’t get to Prague, and maybe won’t get tot see them?

“The stones are concrete cubes around 10cm each, or four inches if you want to be metric about it, and then there is a sheet of brass on top with writing. The writing reads ‘here lived – the name of a person, the date of birth, the date of transport, where that person was deported and the place and date of that person’s murder’.”