Polish Cemetery Expert Jan Jagielski Awarded Irena Sendler Memorial Award by the Taube Foundation.

Jan Jagielski at Ber Sonnenberg Monument (1832) in Jewish cemetery of Warsaw,
prior to monument restoration. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber

Polish Cemetery Expert Jan Jagielski Awarded Irena Sendler Memorial Award by the Taube Foundation

Jan Jagielski, whose decades-long dedication to the documentation, protection and preservation of Jewish cemeteries and other sites in Poland is legendary, has been awarded the second annual Irena Sendler Memorial Award by the Taube Foundation. My sister Ruth, who introduced me to Jan in 1990 - she had already known him for years - has written about Jan and the award on her blog, where she has also posted the press release form the Taube Foundation.

Poland: Extensive Marker Program Recalls Warsaw Ghetto Boundaries

Poland: Extensive Marker Program Recalls Warsaw Ghetto Boundaries
by Samuel D. Gruber



(ISJM) When I was recently in Warsaw I took most of a day to walk around the area of the Warsaw Ghetto which had, of course, also been among the most densely populated Jewish neighborhoods of the city before the Shoah. I made my way to many of the monuments which I already knew, and I wanted to get a sense of where the new Museum of the History of the Jews in Poland would rise - across from the Ghetto Uprising Monument by Natan Rapoport.

This part of Warsaw is a baffling one, since there are entire layers of history - streets, buildings, houses, stores, people - all lost beneath the post-war and post -Ghetto building boom that transformed this area into vast acres of wide streets and big apartment blocks. The Ghetto monuments are among the few distinctive landmarks.

Gone too, is any sense of the perimeter of the Ghetto, the infamous Wall which figured so mightily in wartime reality and post-Holocaust imagination. Together with the chimneys of the Death Camp crematoria, the Warsaw Ghetto Wall is the architectural form that has came to represent most the suffering of the Poland's Jews under German occupation. As the Ghetto was made smaller, as the wall tightened, so too did Jewish hopes diminish. But today, wandering the new Warsaw cityscape - where is the wall?

To my surprise, I came across a new monument on ulica Bielanska, not far from the site of the (destroyed) great Synagogue, that gave me a clue about the Wall. I had not heard of this monument and it is not yet included on any map or in any guide. As it happens it is but one small part of an ambitious new project by the City of Warsaw and the Ministry of Culture in cooperation with the Jewish Historical Institute (JHI) is bringing the memory of the wall back. The work is still in progress, but will be officially inaugurated at the JHI on November 19th.

This project of Ghetto memory sees the city as a palimpsest - and under the lines of the new street the old patterns can still be seen - albeit faintly. 21 bronze reliefs are being installed along the route of the Ghetto wall. 13 reliefs are placed on still-extant patches of wall used as part of the Ghetto enclosure. The rest are set onto freestanding stelae. Together they mark the ghetto border when it was at its biggest. Explanatory texts help orient the viewer. Some of these markers - the ones where no part of the wall survives - include strips of pavement labeled "Ghetto Wall" that are embedded in the surrounding pavements and give a sense of exactly where the wall once was. This method of tracing outline of lost walls is not new (a good example is the memorial for the Orphan Boys' Home in Amsterdam, where an outline of the building in whose site is mostly covered by the new Town Hall was laid out with ceramic tiles in the surrounding pavement by artist Otto Treumann), but in Warsaw it is done very well.

I'm very impressed by this project. It is one of the very best that I have seen anywhere that endeavors to reorient the viewer to an historic topography rather than the contemporary one. For Jewish sites this type of evocation of lost places is essential, since throughout Europe so much of Jewish culture is lost, destroyed and built over. The Warsaw project demonstrates that there are ways that are both aesthetically and didactically satisfactory - that these lost places and spaces can be recalled, if not actually recovered. The effort to create and install a system of distinct but related markers is important. Whether for the Ghetto Wall, or for relocating Jewish communal institutions or any other set of sites, a system indicates that recovered sites were not individual, casual or accidental creations, but they are part of a complex network of places and community now gone. This technique can work with any kind of lost heritage, not just Jewish. But for Jewish heritage - especially in cities once full of Jews where few physical remains survive - markers are a must.

I don't know who is responsible for this new marker system, but I am sure my friends Eleonora Bergman, Director of the Jewish Historical Institute and Jan Jagielski, researcher of Jewish sites par excellence are involved. Both Lena and Jan, by the way, have new books out about Jewish Warsaw before and during the Ghetto period. I'll write about them another time.

Conference of Poles Who Preserve Jewish Heritage, September 15-16, 2008

photo: Jan Jagielski in Warsaw Jewish Cemetery
photo: Samuel D. Gruber 1993

Conference of Poles Who Preserve Jewish Heritage, September 15-16, 2008
by Samuel D. Gruber

(ISJM) The first national conference of (non-Jewish) Poles who care for Jewish heritage sites in Poland is scheduled for next week (Sept. 15-16) in the town of Zdunska Wola, near Lodz in central Poland. The government-supported conference is the brain-child of local activist Kamila Klauzinska, graduate student in Jewish studies at Krakow's Jagiellonian University, one of many non-Jewish Poles who volunteer to protect and preserve Jewish heritage in Poland. To read more and to see the schedule go to Ruth Ellen Gruber’s Jewish-Heritage-Travel blog. Ruth has been covering many of these efforts as a journalist and travel writer for more than 20 years.

This conference is a welcome development and similar events are being encouraged in other countries where Jews are often “caretaker” communities, and cannot provide alone the protection and maintenance that so many of the Jewish sites for which they are responsible require. Only with the help of local people can this be done, and locals are most often willing to help when the better understand the sanctity of sites, and their history and cultural significance. I am pleased to see that Jan Jagielski of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw will be addressing the conference. Long before the fall of Communism, Jan and a small group of colleagues began to document forgotten Jewish sites, and to encourage and train local people in their care.

No one knows more about the location and condition of Jewish sites in Poland, especially cemeteries, than Jan. I had the privilege of collaborating with Jan and Eleonora Bergman (now director of the Institute) in the early 1990s as we prepared the first comprehensive inventory of Jewish cemeteries in Poland.

That work, which was a project of the Jewish Heritage Council of the World Monuments Fund on behalf of the United States Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad, was in a small way the foundation on which almost all subsequent planning, preservation and legal actions were built. Lena and Jan directed that survey which included sites visits to close 1200 sites over forty participants.

Today, Lena, Jan and many of those first survey field workers still lead the way in the care of Poland’s Jewish heritage. Others, like Adam Penkalla of Radom have sadly passed away. Fortunately, however, a new general of younger volunteers and trained professionals has come forward, inspired by the work of the "pioneers." As the documentary and conservation work of the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland demonstrates, much has been accomplished in Poland. Much, of course, remains to be done.

We must remember, too, that volunteerism is only one part of what is required to protect and preserve Jewish heritage sites in Poland and elsewhere. There must be government recognition and support of these activites, and they must be fully integrated into broader cultural heritage, education and economic development policies. Lastly, more Jewish communities must be educated and empowered to participate more fully in this role. Sometimes small communities are too overwhelmed with the needs of the present to look back at the remains from the past. Sometimes Jewish leadership is scared (often with good reason) to take on local vested interests of government and business to insist on return of religious and cultural heritage sites. In the 1990s Central and Eastern European governments had incentives - EU and NATO membership among them - to cooperate in this effort. Now, with other global problems looming, it is difficult to gain (often new) governments' interest and commitment.

ISJM applauds the efforts of the volunteers of Poland and encourages others to learn from their example.