Jewish Heritage Europe: Retooled, Redesigned and Relaunched

Jewish Heritage Europe Retooled, Redesigned and Relaunched

Jewish-Heritage-Europe.eu, an ambitious website intended to collate new and information about Jewish historic, religious and cultural sites in Europe funded by the Rothschild Foundation and active especially in 2006-2007, has been entirely redesigned and updated. The version of the site which is much more user friendly and contains more up-to-date information and news was given a "soft-launch" in Prague in December.

The new site will include most of the old site detailed information on Jewish sites in European countries, but will update and expand this information, include many more photos, and link this material to news items, new publications and broader topics ad issues relevant to the study, preservation, protection and presentation of Jewish sites.

According to new home page:

"Jewish Heritage Europe is a comprehensive web site aimed at facilitating communication and information exchange regarding projects, initiatives and other developments concerning Jewish heritage and Jewish heritage sites: restoration, funding, ongoing projects, best-practices, advisory services and more. We hope to foster contacts among Jewish communities, private individuals or bodies, foundations, state and civic organizations, monuments protection authorities and other stakeholders and interested parties.

As a project of the Rothschild Foundation (Hanadiv) Europe, our goal is for JHE to be a clearing house for a variety of such information and a go-to online resource for people involved or interested in Jewish heritage to find addresses, contacts and news. You can also find us on Facebook and follow our Twitter feed."

To contribute information to Jewish-Heritage-Europe.eu write here.

Austria: Extensive List of Austrian Jewish Heritage Sites Now Online

Vienna: Austria. Display of Judaica at Jewish Museum. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2004

Austria: Extensive List of Austrian Jewish Heritage Sites Now Online

The website www.jewish-heritage-europe.eu has posted an extensive list of Jewish heritage sites in Austria. The Austria pages are divided into three sections: An Introduction, Austria 1 (Vienna), and Austria 2(Outside Vienna).

The site lists museums, collections, libraries, synagogues, cemeteries, memorials and other sites with Jewish associations. I have been providing comprehensive lists to Jewish-Heritage-Europe.eu, and more than twenty countries are now posted. Detailed lists for Bulgaria and Greece will be posted soon. Sharman Kadish and Jon Cannon in the UK also contribute to the writing and editing process.

Estonia: New Info on Jewish Sites Listed On-Line

Tallin, Estonia. Jewish cemetery. Photos: Samuel D. Gruber

Estonia: New Information on Jewish Sites Listed On-Line

(ISJM) New, extensive and up-to-date information about Jewish heritage sites in Estonia has recently been added to the website www.jewish-heritage-europe.eu, where detailed lists and descriptions of Jewish sites in a number of little documented countries are being posted, little by little.

The Estonia section includes the most comprehensive information available about synagogues and former synagogues, cemeteries and Holocaust-related sites.

The Jewish Community in Estonia continues to move forward on several heritage documentation projects. The two most prominent are the placement of commemorative marker on the site of the Great Choral Synagogue of Tallinn at 5 Maakri Street, and the erection of more commemorative markers on sites of the approximately 20 Nazi-sounded labor and death sites throughout the country, where up to 20,000 Jews from Germany, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania and elsewhere toiled - especially in the oil shale industry - and where many died. In the past five years the project has identified these site, some of which were never marked, and others which were marked with non-specific commemorative inscriptions dating from the Soviet period. New or additional markers were installed at five sites - Ereda, Kiviõli, Klooga, Illuka, Metsakmistu and Vaivara, in 2005. Markers are reportedly ready for another three sites, though there have been delays over disputes about who will maintain them.

The Jewish community of Estonia dedicated a new synagogue in Tallinn (photos) in 2007 designed by local architects Kimmel and Stöör and last December (2008) they opened a museum to document the life of Estonian Jews from the second half of the 19th century to the present.

Synagogue360.org May Be the Best Synagogue Website Ever!

Synagogues360.org May Be the Best Synagogue Website Ever!

I've just stumbled across what may be the best synagogue website ever. Why didn't I know about this? Well, there are so many people out there doing good work that it just isn't possible to keep track of them all - and all their projects. Fortunately, when looking for some on-line photos of synagogues in Piedmont for my Syracuse University class, I hit www.synagogues360.org, an amazing collection of high quality panoramic images of more than forty synagogues around the world, taken by Louis A. Davidson of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Louis and his wife Ronnie have prepared this project, which is now housed at Beth Hatfusoth (Museum of the Diaspora) in Tel Aviv, but is available online to everyone, everywhere.

Davidson's panorama includes well-known buildings like the Spanish Synagogue in Prague and (Frank Lylod Wright's) Congregation Beth Shalom in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, but also many lesser known but well preserved buildings, with a good number in Central Europe and Italy. Several of these are restored synagogues that I have had some connection with in past years (Pfaffenhoffen, Boskovice), so it is terrific to be able to link to the site to show off these achievements.

Looking at these panoramic images allows one to fully appreciate the architecture of these spaces, and their scale, aswell as their decoration - sometimes simple (Pfaffenhoofen) and sometimes over the top (Casale Monferrrato). As much as I like - and depend upon - the information in texts such as Carol Herselle Krinsky's now classic and still-essential Synagogues of Europe (1985) it is hard to convey the interest and real beauty of many synagogues from those dreary pictures Carol was forced to work with in 1970s and 80s when she prepared that book. Many new synagogue books use selected color photos and Paul Rocheleau and I tried to do better when we did our 20th century American Synagogue book, where our attempt through still photography was to try to recreate the spatial and visual experience of each synagogue through multiple color photographs. The idea was not to create a single iconic view - that actually might not reflect the way a user saw the building (very few people ever experience synagogues directly on axis). I think we did a pretty good job, but aesthetically Paul's photos can stand alone, and they are designed to please the viewer and also the architectural publisher who wanted (rightly so) to show of the building designs. But nothing that I know of short of visiting each building (still the best thing to do) informs the viewer about synagogue spaces like these panoramas by Louis A. Davidson.

Now, if we could only start documenting these buildings - or at least those that still function as active synagogues - in use, too. (ISJM has sponsored just such documentation by Vincent Giordano of the surviving Romaniote Synagogues in New York and Ioannina, Greece). Because the architecture only really comes alive where one sees people interacting, and one hears prayer and synagogal chant and music. Synagogues are not abstractions - religious, social or historic. They're built for a function, and even when they are elaborate in their "adornment of the commandments," they are best appreciated in use.

Congratulations Louis and Ronnie Davidson on your good work!

USA: Wisconsin Small Jewish Communities History Project

Former Temple Zion, Appleton Wisconsin. Photo from Wisconsin Small Jewish Community Project


Webwatch: Wisconsin (USA) Small Jewish Communities

Reader Diana Muir has sent me a link to the Wisconsin Small Jewish Community Project established in 2001 by the Wisconsin Society for Jewish Learning to "research, preserve, and educate the Jewish and general public about the history of Wisconsin Jewish communities" You can find on the website a database with information about Jewish communities (past and present) throughout Wisconsin, an read a history of Wisconsin's Jews.

There is mention of several synagogues, though not yet much information on the history of the planning, design and architecture of the structures, or of their subsequent histories. A few current restoration projects are mentioned, such as that of the former Temple Zion in Appleton (shown above) which was begin restored in 2005 by the owner, WahlOrgan builders.

Temple Zion, 320 N. Durkee was the synagogue of Appleton's German Jewish - and ultimately Reform Jewish - community. It opened in 1883 with a small school building next door, and the synagogue served the community through the 1920s. The building is reported to be undergoing restored (presumably now finished?) to its original condition and colors.

Appleton had a thriving Jewish community in the 19th century.

Harry Houdini (1874-1926) was the son of the community's first rabbi, Hungarian-born Mayer Samuel Weiss. The Houdinis lived in Appleton from 1874 until 1883, when the rabbi was fired because he couldn't preach in English. Houdini, born Ehrich Weiss in Budapest, often claimed Appleton as his birthplace.

Novelist and playwright Edna Ferber (1885-1968) came at age 12 to Appleton with her family. Her father owned the My Store general store. Ferber began her writing career as a teenage newspaper reporter at the Appleton Crescent (Her 1904 interview with a visiting Houdini is posted on the web site http://www.apl.org.

During a stint at the Milwaukee Journal, Ferber collapsed from exhaustion. She returned to Appleton and wrote her first short story and first novel. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1924 for the novel "So Big." Her 1939 autobiography "My Peculiar Treasure" recalls Appleton's prominent German Jewish community and her experiences in the choir of Temple Zion.

I can not find the town or synagogue of Stevens Point on the database, however. Readers of the ISJM E-Report may remember my notices of the restoration of that synagogue as a museum last June (just before I started this blog). You can read about it here.

Webwatch: Extensive information on Jewish sites in Bosnia-Herzegovina

The website www.Jewish-Heritage-Europe.eu has added extensive information about Jewish heritage sites in: Bosnia-Herzegovina. Jewish-Heritage-Europe.eu has been gradually adding substantive information on hundreds of little-known Jewish sites in more than forty European countries. The Bosnia report, which has information about more than 50 sites in 27 localities relies heavily on information in two reports supported by the United States Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad based on research by Ruth Ellen Gruber and Ivan Čerešnješ. Čerešnješ, a researcher at the Center for Jewish Art at the Hebrew University is former president of the Jewish Community of Sarajevo. The United States Commission was active in Bosnia as a major funder of the restoration of the ceremonial hall/synagogue at the Jewish cemetery in Sarajevo.

Great website: Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland

I recommend the website of the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland at: http://fodz.pl/?d=1&l=en

The website of the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland is one of the most important new engines for tracking the location and condition of Jewish heritage sties. I’ve been involved off and on with the documentation and preservation of Jewish sites in Poland for almost 20 years, waiting for this kind of a high-quality, well-designed and easily accessible database on sites with extensive photographic and descriptive information (I was involved with a failed effort to do this in an earlier computer age). While there is still a long way to go, already over 5000 photos of about 300 sites (mostly cemeteries) are posted. This site does not replace the often more detailed information one can find (erratically) through Shtetlinks and the IAJGS’s cemetery project (http://www.jewishgen.org/Cemetery/ ) and other on-line sources, but it presents the most up-to-date information available on-line.

The Foundation was established by the Union of Jewish Communities in Poland and the World Jewish Restitution Organization (WJRO) with the aim of reclaiming properties owned by Jewish Religious Communities and other Jewish legal entities before World War II (based on the Law on the Relationship between the State and the Union of Jewish Religious Communities of 1997), and the management, restoration and protection of returned properties, especially those of religious or historical significance. After a slow start, the work of the Foundation is well underway and generally of very high quality. To date the Foundation has been involved in restoration projects at many cemeteries including completed projects at Kolno, Koszalin, Kozienice, Różan, Strzegowo, and Zakopane. projects in Bodzanów, Dubienka, Frampol, Iłża, Iwaniska, Kłodzko, Mszczonów, Narol, Przasnysz, Sochaczew, Zielona Góra, Ziębice and elsewhere. The Foundation is also sponsoring the restoration of the 17^th-century synagogue of Zamosc, and has organized extensive educational programs in Poland.

On the web, the Foudnation sponsors the portal POLIN – Polish Jewish Heritage! Which include information including histories, photos, maps and other materials for scores of Polish Jewish sites. The database of information keeps expanding and POLIN welcomes contributions from viewers.