Jewish Heritage -- Final Statement of Bratislava Seminar Released

Synagogue in Abony, Hungary, 2006. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

The Final Statement adopted by participants at the international seminar held in Bratislava in March on the care, conservation and maintenance of historic Jewish property in Europe has been released. The statement represents a milestone in strategic thinking about sites of Jewish heritage, laying out pragmatic guidelines with best-practice principles and procedures for Jewish properties that could serve as models for all involved in the field.

(I have already given a preview of the recommendations in a Ruthless Cosmopolitan column written after the seminar.)

Whereas the restitution of Jewish communal property in Central and Eastern Europe has been a hot-button issue since the Iron Curtain fell nearly 20 years ago, the practical and urgent need to care for, conserve and maintain the properties once they’ve been recovered is often forgotten amid the slow and painful legal battles to get back historic Jewish properties that were seized by the Nazis or nationalized by postwar Communist regimes.

Many of these sites are huge. Many are dilapidated. Some are recognized as historic monuments. Most stand in towns where few, if any, Jews now live. Even basic maintenance can stretch already strapped communal resources.

At the Bratislava seminar, Jewish community representatives from 15 countries gathered to address these concerns.

The aim of the meeting was to foster networking and cross-border consultation and spark creative strategic thinking. Many participants had never met before and had little awareness of how colleagues in other countries were confronting similar challenges. Some knew little about the variety of Jewish heritage sites in other countries.

I took part as an expert -- one of my briefs was, as someone who has spent two decades documenting and writing extensively about Jewish heritage sites in many countries, to introduce participant to the panorama of Jewish built heritage in east-central Europe. Among other things, I ran a slide show of more than 200 pictures, from a variety of countries, showing Jewish heritage sites of all sorts, from all periods -- medieval to modern -- and all states of conservation, -- from ruin to fully restored -- and all sorts of use, from warehouse to house of worship.

Sam Gruber, who as president of the International Survey of Jewish Monuments, was one of the organizers (along with the Joint Distribution Committee and the Slovak Jewish Heritage Center; the World Monuments Fund and the Cahnman Foundation were also sponsors) posted the final statement on his blog (from which I have taken this copy.)

Seminar on Care, Conservation and Maintenance of Historic Jewish Property
Bratislava March 17-19, 2009
Final Statement Adopted By Participants

The participants in the Seminar “Care, Conservation and Maintenance of Historic Jewish Property,” meeting in Bratislava March 17-19, 2009, agree on the following principles and procedures which guide their work.

Introduction

The ongoing struggle for property and resource restitution has often overshadowed the practical issues of how to manage community properties already held, or those returned.

Proper care of these properties; often involving substantial costs, difficult planning and use issues, and demanding historical and architectural preservation concerns, have preoccupied many Jewish communities for years. In many cases, and especially for smaller Communities, the needs of these properties continue to stretch professional and financial resources. Everyday community needs often delay or prevent the attention that properties require.

Each Jewish community faces its own specific situations, and has unique needs, but there are many shared problems and needs that can be addressed collectively. Importantly, there are also solutions - many of which have been pioneered by Communities themselves - that can be shared, too.

Jewish Properties and Jewish Heritage

Jewish heritage is the legacy of all aspects of Jewish history – religious and secular.

Jewish history and art is part of every nation’s history and art. Jewish heritage is part of national heritage, too.

Documentation, planning and development of sites benefit and enrich society at large as well as Jews and Jewish communities.

Jewish historic sites and properties should also be developed where possible within the context of diverse histories – Jewish, local, national, art, etc.

Jewish tourism and tourism to Jewish sites should be part of every country’s tourism strategy.

Inventories and Documentation

All past and present Jewish communal properties, and all Jewish properties and sites deemed to have historic, religious and/or artistic significance, should be documented to the fullest extent possible.

Inventories must be made and maintained of all properties in each country, and more substantial documentation should be made of historically and architecturally significant properties, especially all synagogues, institutional buildings, cemeteries, monuments, and Judaica and archival materials.

Jewish communities and institutions should cooperate and collaborate in this process to the fullest extent possible, and should welcome the assistance of other public and private institutions and individuals in pursuing these documentation goals.

Information on Jewish sites is most useful when it is most widely available. Efforts should continue and expand to make documentation available in publicly accessible research centers and through publications and on-line presentation, all the while considering safety, security and privacy concerns.

Materials relevant to Jewish history and properties in public, state archives and Jewish community archives should be open for everyone for historical and legal research.

Good documentation must be accurate and complete in its description, and it must be historically informed so that it presents something of the significance of what is recorded.

Synagogues and Former Synagogues

Synagogue and former synagogues should retain a Jewish identity and or use whenever possible, though each one does not necessarily need to be restored or fully renovated.

Former synagogues, no matter what their present ownership or use, should be sensitively marked to identify their past history.

As part of the effort to restitute communal and religious property, when a property of historic value - such as a synagogue - in disrepair or otherwise in a ruined condition (while in the government's possession) is returned, States should help either by modifying laws which impose penalties for not maintaining properties in reasonable condition, or by providing financial and material assistance to undertake necessary repairs and restoration.

Cooperation and Trust

Honesty and transparency are Jewish values and should be especially apparent in the handling of all matters concerning Jewish property, which is held as a communal trust.

Jewish communities should manage their properties to maximize their use for present and future generations.

Jewish communities and institutions should work together as much as possible to share existing information, methodologies and technologies, and they should work together to develop new and compatible goals and strategies to optimize the care and management of historic Jewish properties.

Regular meetings of Jewish community leaders, members, staff and expert professionals to discuss property issues is encouraged within single communities, and between communities. Regional, national and trans-border meeting are useful for the exchange of information and ideas, and for effective planning purposes.

Any sale or development of communal property must be to meet identified community needs.

Wherever possible, proceeds from the sale or development of some properties should be allocated to the care and maintenance of other properties including, but not exclusively, cemeteries.

Jewish communities and museums should work together to develop historic, descriptive and exhibition materials that can be shared.

Jewish communities and local heritage, cultural and tourist bodies should work together to develop regional, national and trans-border heritage routes.

My latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column -- klezmer music and the ghost of German past

Me and the Painted Bird in Freiburg

Here's a link to my latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column -- on Punk Cabaret klezmer danse macabre in Germany. In other words, a concert in Freiburg by Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird at the height of the uproar over the pope's rehabilitation of a Holocaust-denying bishop... I've written about klezmer music in Germany a lot over the years (including in a long section of my 2002 book, Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe.) The scene keeps changing and evolving -- and the political edge and genre mix of Daniel's group illustrates this. It may not be "pure" pre-war shtetl music, but it's rooted there, and it takes the music into the 21st century. It was a great concert, and the band's new CD -- Partisans and Parasites, is also worth buying.

FREIBURG, Germany (JTA) -- At the height of the recent uproar over Pope Benedict XVI's rehabilitation of a Holocaust-denying bishop, I attended a klezmer concert in the pontiff's native Germany.

The timing was coincidental. I didn't deliberately set out to counter the pernicious folly of denying history by listening to music rooted in the culture the Nazis sought to destroy.

Still, the concert started me to thinking -- about what and how we remember; about what and how we forget; and about the role contemporary cultural expressions play in determining how we think about things.

I had been to many klezmer concerts in Germany in the past. The traditional music of East European Jews has had a wide following here since the 1980s, when American and other artists began to tour. Scores of homegrown klezmer bands have been formed, and several leading American Jewish music performers settled in Berlin or elsewhere in the country.

Germany's particular history, of course, played a role in the music's popularity.

Some Germans, especially those from older generations, became attracted as part of the manifold process of dealing with the Nazi legacy that is commonly known here as "working through the past."

For more youthful musicians and fans, however, the baggage of guilt is mostly absent. For some, the klezmer sound simply forms part of the eclectic exoticism of world music. For others, its rich cultural contexts provide stimulus for their own creative interpretation.

The group I saw this time was The Painted Bird, a Berlin-based band pointedly named for the Holocaust novel by Jerzy Kosinski. Known for making music with a sharp political edge, the band describes itself on its MySpace page as "Punk Cabaret + Radical Yiddish Song + Gothic American Folk + Klezmer Danse Macabre."

Its leader is Daniel Kahn, a 30-year-old Detroit native who forms part of the current wave of American Jewish musical transplants to the German capital.

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Poland -- My Ruthless Cosmopolitan column about Henryk Halkowski

Here's the link to my Ruthless Cosmopolitan column remembering my old friend Henryk Halkowski, the writer and local historian who died in his native Krakow on New Year's Day.

Ruthless Cosmopolitan: Farewell to a Pintele Yid

Jan. 22, 2009

BUDAPEST (JTA) -- The Yiddish expression "dos pintele Yid" is often translated as "the Jewish spark" -- an indestructible core of Jewishness that lurks deep within even unknowing or alienated Jews, ready to spring back to life at any unexpected moment.

The Forward's language maven, Philologos, once devoted a column to the term, describing it as an almost mystical notion.

"It posits that all Jews, even if they are unaware of it or have been raised so un-Jewishly that they do not know they are Jewish, have within them a Jewish essence that can be activated under certain circumstances," Philologos wrote.

Henryk Halkowski, who died suddenly on New Year's Day in his native Krakow, Poland, may have been one of the least mystical people I ever knew, but in many ways he embodied this concept.

A writer, translator and local historian, Henryk was like a pintele Yid for an entire city -- a city whose Jewish population of more than 65,000 had been all but wiped out in the Shoah. A city where only some 200 or so Jews live today.

To my mind, Henryk was one of the most noteworthy personalities in the new Jewish reality that has emerged in Poland since the Iron Curtain came down nearly 20 years ago.

"He was a guardian of Krakow's Jewish legacy," said Joachim Russek, director of the city's Center for Jewish Culture.

Born in 1951 into the echoing vacuum of post-Holocaust Poland, Henryk was haunted by the ghosts of Krakow's Holocaust dead and the generations of Krakow Jews who went before them.

He, in turn, haunted Jewish Krakow, learning its secrets and becoming so intimately attached that he seemed to have real, psychological difficulty leaving the city even for a few days.

"He was a character," said Stanislaw Krajewski, a leader in Poland's Jewish revival and the American Jewish Committee representative in Warsaw. "He was so Cracovian -- a Krakow curiosity."

With his encyclopedic knowledge of Krakow's Jewish history, culture, legend and lore, Henryk became a touchstone for me and other Jewish foreigners who began trickling in to Krakow in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

"For many of us, Henryk Halkowski was one of our first significant encounters with Krakow, and for all the years thereafter he remained a fixture of its character as much as any other person or institution," said Michael Traison, an American lawyer who has worked for years in Poland and sponsored many projects aimed at preserving Jewish heritage and fostering Jewish revival.

A stocky figure with thick glasses and a gray-flecked beard, Henryk was a familiar figure in Krakow's Jewish quarter, Kazimierz, where he roamed the streets with a restless energy.

"Wherever one walked in Kazimierz, regardless of the time of day or night, you couldn't help but run into him, then have a drink, then have a meal," recalled the klezmer musician and filmmaker Yale Strom, who met Halkowski in 1984 and featured him in several of his documentaries.

I first met Halkowski in the early 1990s.

Back then Kazimierz was a slum, a dilapidated ghost town that still showed the scars of Nazi mass murder and communist oppression.

Henryk, as head of a Jewish club, had formed the nucleus of a group of younger Jews who had attempted to revive Yiddish culture in the 1980s.

He recalled to me how foreign Jews often seemed uncomfortable meeting younger Jews in Poland -- how they couldn't understand their desire, or need, to remain.

"American Jews have a stereotype about Polish Jews who stayed here," he told me. "It's as if we are seen as 'traitors' to the nation."

In the years since then, Kazimierz has grown into a lively tourist center, with Jewish-style cafes, renovated synagogues, kitschy souvenirs and constantly milling tour groups.

The district has a resident rabbi and a Chabad center, and there is a plethora of Jewish cultural and educational institutions -- even a local Jewish publishing house, which has brought out Henryk's own books.

Henryk was an acute observer of the transformation, even as he became one of its protagonists.

"Disheveled and in disarray, he never disappointed as he cynically critiqued the absurdity of the Disneyland display of Jewish heritage and tragedy," Traison said.

"Orally and through his writings, he offered a sincere and unique insight into Cracovian culture and specifically that special Kazimierz life created since the fall of communism.

"Henryk remained and remains a genuine part of that milieu," he said. "And if one word is needed to describe him that is it: genuine."

In 1997 I took a picture of Henryk, a wry grin on his face, as he posed a trifle awkwardly at a Krakow souvenir stall selling T-shirts and carved wooden figures of Jews.

"Shall I tell you my obsession?" he asked me once, as he tucked into a bowl of chicken soup and kreplach at one of Kazimierz's trendy new Jewish-style restaurants.

"What we need in Kazimierz is some sort of institution that presents Jewish life as it really was here. What an apartment was like, for example; what a cheder was like, what a workshop was like. How the people here really lived. Something to inject a bit of reality into the gentrification."

Henryk was buried in Krakow's Jewish cemetery. Some 300 people braved the snow and bitter cold to pay their last respects. Rabbis and cafe keepers alike mourned at the graveside.

I could not make the trip to attend. But I remembered what Henryk had told me years ago, during one of our earliest conversations.

"Kazimierz," he said, "can be a place where meaning can be materialized."

That still holds true. But it simply won't be the same without him.

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My latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column

This has to do with a virtual Jewish space -- on Facebook

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN: Just Being (Jewish)

Ruth Ellen Gruber

December 22, 2008

ROME (JTA) -- Not long ago, a Facebook friend of mine wrote that she had had a great time at a Shabbat dinner even if there had been "a wee bit much talk" of religion.

"Why all this American obsession with Jewish identity?" she wrote on her profile page on the social networking site. "Just BE!"

Her comment got me thinking.

Defining Jewish identity, refining Jewish identity, reclaiming Jewish identity, reinforcing Jewish identity -- these seem indeed to be constant concerns among many Jews, and not just in the United States.

"Jewish identity" has been the subject of endless conferences, surveys, books, articles, analyses and movies -- not to mention comedy routines. A Google search for "Jewish identity" gave me 573,000 matches!

What impact, I wondered, does this all have on who we are -- or at least on who we say we are?

I decided to carry out an unscientific study to find out -- a very unscientific study.

My methodology was simple: I used Facebook to see how Jews, or at least Jews I know, define themselves in terms of religious identity.

For those unfamiliar with Facebook, a site that has 120 million users around the world, its software permits you to connect with lists of "friends" who are in turn linked with friends' lists of their own.

Upon joining you create a profile, including information you want to make public about your age, sex, location, profession, personal views and even your sexual preference. You pick and choose what you want to post. Some people post only their name; others provide the whole megillah.

One of the choices is to state your "religious views." You can choose whether or not to post anything at all about your religious beliefs and, if you opt to post, you choose how you want to define yourself; there is a blank space you can fill in with whatever you want to say.

For my study, I simply checked how my Facebook friends I know to be Jewish chose to respond.

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Romania -- More on my genealogy travels

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

I posted a lot on this already, but I want to point out that my current Ruthless Cosmopolitan column on JTA deals with my recent trip to Romania with my cousins, on which we dabbled in family history and, as the cliche goes, walked in the footsteps of our ancestors.

RADAUTI, Romania (JTA) -- It's the custom in Judaism to visit the graves of family members around the High Holidays.

This year I went a step further and walked in the footsteps of my ancestors.

My father's parents, who immigrated to the United States before World War I, were born near the market town of Radauti in the Bucovina region of northern Romania.

This is where I went a couple of weeks before Rosh Hashanah. It was my fourth trip to Radauti, which when my grandparents lived there was one of the easternmost towns in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

My first visit there was more than 30 years ago, in the freezing December of 1978. I was a correspondent for United Press International and was accompanying Romania's then-chief rabbi, Moses Rosen, on his annual Chanukah tour to far-flung remnant communities throughout the country.

I recall visiting 19 Jewish communities in six days. Elderly people in winter coats and astrakhan hats huddled together in unheated synagogues, and puffs of steam came from the mouths of the Jewish choir from Bucharest that came along with us to perform.

My brother Sam also was on that trip, and he and I took time in Radauti to visit the Jewish cemetery and pick our way through the stones to find the grave of our great-grandmother, Ettel Gruber, who died in 1946 and in whose honor I was given my middle name.

Discovering her grave did not trigger in me any further genealogical impulse, though what we experienced on our trip around Romania that week sowed the seeds of my interest in Jewish heritage.

Read full story at jta.org