Slovakia: What's Wrong with the Bratislava Holocaust Memorial?

[n.b. this was first posted on June 17, 2009]

Slovakia: What's Wrong with the Bratislava Memorial?
by Samuel D. Gruber

(ISJM) My readers know my interest in getting the story straight, and when it comes to Holocaust Monuments and Memorials I have a strong sense that collectively they are not getting or telling the story - straight or otherwise.

The big question is how can one remember what one doesn't know? How can one "not forget" what is never fully discussed or taught? In some recent posts I've discussed some ways that informative narratives can be added to monuments to make them meaningful to everyone who passes by and wants to know.

We all know that monuments - whether to kings, generals, scientists or town fathers - go silent after not too many years. In the case of many purported Holocaust memorials, silence is built into their very design. Their purpose is clear only to a chosen few. With a didactic or narrative text, few people know what these monuments stand for- and those that do know have the excuse to avoid specifics.

This is the case of the Holocaust Memorial in Bratislava, Slovakia, and also its adjacent commemorative synagogue image, erected in 1996 in the Old Town center of Bratislava, on the site of the former Neolog Synagogue which was torn down in the Soviet period (not by the Nazis or their Slovak allies) to make way for a highway.



The monument is a striking piece of sculpture, and its placement, and the adjacent wall size engraved image of the Great Synagogue are very effective ways to enliven an otherwise near-dead space - a former plaza now cut through be a highway. But to the passing resident or visitor, young or old, they say nothing of what they are and why they are there, and they give no details the people and places they are meant to recall.

According to Maros Borsky on the website of the Slovak Jewish Heritage Center:

The Memorial was erected in 1996 by the Slovak Republic to commemorate the memory of 105,000 Holocaust victims from Slovakia. The location was not selected accidentally. The Holocaust memorial was composed as a place of public remembrance, where two layers of history intertwine: the memory of the tragic event and the memory of the former Rybné Square synagogue, still remembered by many Bratislavians, and which can be often found on historical photos hanging in Bratislava cafés. The memorial consists of the black wall with silhouette of the destroyed synagogue and the central sculpture with non-figurative motif and a David Shield on the top, placed on the black granite platform with “zachor” [remember] and “pamätaj” inscriptions. The plot of the former synagogue is owned by the Bratislava Municipality, which leases the site for an annual symbolical fee to the Museum of Jewish Culture, which maintains the memorial.

I was struck on my last visit to Bratislava that none of this information is knowable without going to Maros's website. There is no sign, no plaque, not text at all except "Remember!" in Hebrew and Slovak. In the history of Bratislava there are so many events one can be asked to remember, so which does this recall?

Some might say I'm unfair, since monuments do receive attention when they are the focus of events - such as Yom ha-Shoah or some other Day of Remembrance. Still, what about the rest of the year? A good monument has a job to do, and it should be on the job full time. It's not like a tuxedo or fancy dress only taken out once a year for the Opera.

Some artist friends of mine - including some who have made monuments - have said to me that their work should not be labeled, or constricted by one interpretation. I have no problem with that, the work can be interpreted in any way, or in many ways. But the event it purportedly commemorates is not open to such interpretation. In an age of Holocaust Denial we cannot allow that. Some specifics - the what, who, how and when need to be stated, and stately unequivocally.

I hope that the Museum of Jewish Culture in Bratislava will take heed, and take action. Put up a sign, a plaque, something informative to help people remember.

Exhibitions: German Jewish Museums Focus on Eastern European Jews in Germany Before and After the Shoah

Entrance to the Kempler pastryshop and Krakow Café, Grenadierstraße, Berlin 1926
© JMB, Schenkung von Hillel Kempler

D H. Lewin bookshop, Grenadierstraße 28, Berlin, ca. 1930 © bpk

Looking into Schendelgasse, Herbert Sonnenfeld, Berlin, ca 1935-1938
© JMB, purchase funds from the German Lottery Foundation Berlin

Sale of dry goods in Grenadierstraße , Frederick Seidenstücker, Berlin, 1932 © bpk

Exhibitions: German Jewish Museums Focus on Eastern European Jews in Germany Before and After the Shoah

Two exhibitions at German Jewish museums focus on the history and legacy of Eastern European Jewish immigrants to Germany before and after the Shoah. At the Berlin Jewish Museum the exhibition Berlin Transit traces the lives, settlement patterns and cultural expressions of Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe in the 1920s, especially those poorer Jews who settled in the neighborhood of Scheunenviertel, near Alexanderplatz, others in middle-class Charlottenburg.The exhibtion includes photos form the old neighborhoods as well as objects from the time, but it also includes works of fine art by some of the best Jewish artists of the interwar period, including Issachar Ber Ryback and Leonid Paternak. A cycle of pogrom images by Ryback is on display in Berlin for the first time since 1924. The imagery in these works will remind viewers of similar scenes in Marc Chagall's crucifixion series of the later 1920s. Rybacks' avant-garde watercolors join in dialogue with Leonid Pasternak's paintings and Naum Gabo's sculptures.

Meanwhile, an exhibition at the Munich Jewish Museum the exhibition Jews 45/90 From Here and There - Survivors from Eastern Europe examines the fate of Eastern European Holocaust survivors who settled in Germany after 1945. The Munich exhibitions examine the lives of DPs in the Munich area after the World War II, when Germany became home for tens of thousands of Eastern European survivors. This exhibit is purported to be the most comprehensive presentation to date about the everyday life, history and culture of Jewish Displaced Persons. The exhibit especially focuses on the stories of individuals, and also the varied living conditions of DPs. While some DPs remained in Germany and until the recent large influx of Russian Jews constituted the majority of Germany's post-war Jewish community, most emigrated again to Israel, the United States and other countries.

Berlin Transit: Jewish Migrants from Eastern Europe in the 1920s at the Jewish Museum Berlin

Through July 15, 2012

As a hub connecting East and West, Berlin was a place of refuge and a way station for tens of thousands of Jews from Eastern Europe starting in the late nineteenth century, and particularly after the First World War. Most of them were fleeing westwards, away from the war, revolution and pogroms of the former Russian Empire and the Habsburg Monarchy.

With its multilingualism and complex internal networks, the community of Eastern European immigrants brought about a heyday of Jewish culture in Berlin. Many of the poor Jewish immigrants lived in the Scheunenviertel area near Alexanderplatz, others in middle-class Charlottenburg, a district of the city referred to as "Charlottengrad" on account of the high proportion of Russians who lived there.

This cultural-historical exhibition focuses on the diverse worlds of Eastern European Jews in Berlin of the Weimar Republic, and presents a wealth of unknown materials: literary and autobiographic texts can be heard in their original languages (Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew and German), largely unknown photographs of the Scheunenviertel are subject to critical analysis and newly interpreted.

After the  Pogrom, series by Issachar Ber Ryback, drawing, Kiev/ Moskow, 1918/1920
© Mishkan LeOmanut, Museum of Art Ein Harod, Israel

Birds in Yiddish children's book, Leib Kwitko and Issachar Ber Ryback, Schwellen Verlag, Berlin, 1922
© Gross Family Collection, Tel Aviv

 Die Berlinerin, Issachar Ber Ryback, Kiev and Berlin, 1919/1921-1924, oil on canvas

© Bat Yam Municipality, Israel

Max Liebermann opened an exhibition at the Berlin Academy of Arts, Leonid O. Pasternak, Berlin, 1930, oil on canvas © Jerusalem, The Israel Museum

The exhibition was developed in cooperation with the research project "Charlottengrad and Scheunenviertel: Jewish Immigrants from Eastern Europe in Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s" at the Eastern Europe Institute of the Free University of Berlin.

At the end of the exhibition visitors are invited to explore urban space for traces of the largely forgotten places that reflect the immigration of Eastern European Jews to Berlin.

A catalog of the exhibition (in German) is available.

Jews 45/90: From Here and There - Survivors from Eastern Europe

November 30th, 2011 through June 17th, 2012

Divided into nine different themed displays, the lives of DPs are described from their liberation until their emigration to Israel or other countries. It is not a straightforward story that is told. Depending on the occupation policies of the Allied Forces, the relief organizations, and international political developments, Jewish refugees did not know how long and under what conditions they had to carry on living in DP camps. Visitors therefore make their way through a maze - with a view of the next displays always barred. Many of the exhibits may seem at first glance to be everyday objects of little value. Their significance unfolds through the stories and memories that the lenders associate with them.

On the second exhibition level visitors are led into the Föhrenwald DP camp, now the Waldram district of Wolfratshausen, that existed from 1945-1957, longer than all other DP camps in Germany. Insights into the various aspects of camp life and the stories of individual families open up between the silhouettes of the characterstic Föhrenwald estate houses.

The richly illustrated exhibition catalog From Here and There Survivors from Eastern Europe provides further information on the DP era and on the exhibited objects. In the essay section, the children of former Displaced Persons such as the authors Lily Brett and Savyon Liebrecht, reflect their own family histories inspired by the objects in the exhibition.

Lithuania: In Search of the Hidden Holocaust Monument of Vilnius

 Vilnius, Lithuania. Flame of Hope. Photo from Foundation for the Arts

Cross posted from Defending History.com

The Hidden Monument of Vilnius
11 February 2012

 

In response to several requests from the United States, DefendingHistory.com this week asked three separate Westerners who found themselves in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, to try to see the “Flame of Hope” monument, by sculptor Leonardo Nierman, in memory of the victims of the Lithuanian Holocaust, located in the heart of the Old Town, in a yard that was in the Vilna Ghetto between September 1941 and the ghetto’s liquidation three years later.

The story of the monument got underway nearly thirty years ago when the idea first came to the person who made it happen, Shelly Rybak Pearson of Florida, USA, who contributed a DH.com comment piece on the subject last December.

The seemingly interminable saga has been the subject of a number of American media outlets, including a feature article in the Palm Beach Post and a television interview for the Miami Herald. For many years, the Lithuanian Embassy in Washington DC and the American Embassy in Vilnius have participated in the conversation concerning the monument. Discussions in different periods have dealt with agreeing a text for the inscription (see box at the end of this article), the venue for the monument, and above all — accessibility of the monument to the general public, Lithuanians and foreign visitors alike.

What is agreed by all sides is that the monument is located in the courtyard of the building that housed one of interwar Vilna’s prime Jewish educational institutions, the Yídishe reál-gimnàzye. During the Holocaust, the building tragically became the headquarters of the Nazi-established Judenrat, or “Jewish authority” within the ghetto. Like the other ghettos in major Lithuanian cities, the Vilna Ghetto continued to incarcerate the shrinking remnant of Lithuanian Jewry for several years after the majority were shot in the summer and fall of 1941, mostly by local perpetrators volunteering to kill the civilian Jewish population for the Nazis, at hundreds of mass grave sites across Lithuania.

Read the entire post here

Holocaust Memorials in American Jewish Cemeteries

Holocaust Memorials in American Jewish Cemeteries

Jerry Klinger, who through through the not-for -profit Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation has organized the creation and installation of historical and commeorative markers at the many Jewish historic sites across the Unted States (and some abroad), and brought to my attention a section of the website of the (online) Museum of Family History, that documents  monuments commemorating Holcocaust victims erected in Jewish cemeteries and New York and New Jersey.  These monuments, often erected by landsmanshaftn (in the same spirit in which memorial books were compiled),  are little known, and are increasingly forgotten.  This on-line exhibit brings many of these monuments to public view, and offers and opportunity to remember and reconsider the fate of those who died.  The web exhibit is well done, with good photos and complete transcrioptions of inscriptions and the names.

There are believed to be thousands of physical memorials to the Holocaust in the United States, located mainly in synagogues and cemeteries, but also in schools, hospitals and increasignly in the past two decades in public venues.  These memorials include small plaques and inscriptions; memorial plantings in gardens; larger statues and monuments; and permanent educational exhibitions and museums.  There have been some (faield) efforts to document all these memorials, but to date there is no central inventopry or registry. At best, local historical societies and other groups keep records of lcoal examples.  The webpage of New York and New Jersey cemetery monuments is a good example.

Accroding to the web exhibit text:

 "There is not one typical memorial, though most are made of stone or granite. Some are large and detailed, others are small and simple. Some list the names of individuals and entire families that perished. Some have a large amount written in Hebrew, in Yiddish or in English; others are written in all three languages. Some memorials even contain tangible remnants of those horrible times--ashes from Auschwitz or a bar of soap that was made by the Nazis from the bodies of their Jewish victims.

It was the job of the landsmanshaftn, those social organizations that had originated in and represented their hometowns back in Europe, to care for their own. One of their many functions was to provide a burial place for their members. For these landsleit there were perhaps expectations that when they emigrated, other members of their family would eventually join them, spend the rest of their lives in a land that would truly welcome them, and perhaps at the end of their life, be buried alongside each other. For those that couldn't or chose not to emigrate, and for those would reluctantly left their families behind and be permanently separated from them, these memorials serve as a lasting tribute, a permanent link that connects them in both life and death.

Within this exhibition are representations of these memorials: photographs, names of the deceased, quotes from various Hebrew texts and blessings in English. Shown here are the majority of Holocaust memorials that exist in the New York and New Jersey metro area

The Museum of Family History, created by Steven Lasky, is a virtual (Internet-only), multimedia, and interactive creation designed for those  "interested in learning more about modern Jewish history, as well as those who were a part of this history, who now grace the many branches of our family tree. The Museum humbly attempts to honor the Jewish people and the Jewish family unit in particular."

Publication: Memorializing the Holocaust: Gender, Genocide and Collective Memory

Berlin, Germany. Rosenstrasse Protest Monument. Ingeborg Hunzinger, artist. Monument installed 1995. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber.

Women of Ravenbruck. Exhibit at Florida Holocaust Museum.

Memorializing the Holocaust: Gender, Genocide and Collective Memory

Readers of the blog may be interested in Janet Jacobs book, published last year, that explores how women's experience of the Holocaust is described and commemorated. It is a rare work that addresses issues of gender, collective memory and public commemoration, particularly in monuments and memorial museums. Dora Apel and Barbie Zelizer and others have done this, too, particularly in regard to the work of individual artists.

Having recently been a consultant for the archaeological excavation in Cologne, and visited Worms again, I am particularly interested in her views in chapter 5 (as reported by Boffey), that

For Jacobs, the effect of drawing attention to pre-genocide Jewry is to exoticize Jewish culture and tradition. As she sees it, the darkened, subterranean exhibition spaces at sites such as the Rashi House Jewish Museum in Worms lends a mix of nostalgic rural pastiche and hints of "Otherness" to depictions of pre-twentieth-century Jewish heritage. The suggestion that this "embed[s] the Jew in a medieval archaeology" (p. 125), facilitating a disidentification on the part of German audiences, is an interesting one. To be sure, this kind of distancing could conceivably smooth over the problematic fact that a great many Jewish Holocaust victims were also Germans--and assimilated Germans at that. But to argue, as Jacobs does, that this actually "re-stigmatizes" the Jews, who can then be "blamed for their own suffering and destruction" (p. 132), unfairly does away with the searching debates conducted within reunified Germany (not to mentionthose already taking place in the Federal Republic of Germany prior to 1989) that revolve around exactly this issue of German guilt and complicity in the Holocaust.[1] (Boffney, paragraph 6, below)

Worms, Germany. Rashi Lehrhaus. Judaica Exhibit on lower level. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber (2011)

More often, it has been argued that such exhibits - and excavations such as that in Cologne - provided discomfort to Germans in the past - and may still do so - precisely because they embed Jews deep in the German past, and re-establish their role as players in a long history. The antiquity of Jews in German continues to be much-debated and contentious issue. This point, however, seems to be only a small part of Jacobs thesis.

Another point she apparently raises (Boffney, below paragraph 5) - which parallels my own experience and perception - is her equating the exhibition of damaged Torah scrolls in memorial and especially historical exhibitions with medieval depictions of the vanquished synagoga figure. While ostensibly presented to inform and perhaps evoke pity or outrage, the damaged scroll often really serve as evidence of effective destruction - and the passing of "the old law." A Jew may be offended by these presentaiton. Non-Jews are fascinated by the exoticism and thus irrelevancy of the scroll. It could just as well be an old Sumerian cuneiform tablet, an excavated curio.

Berlin, Germany. Torah Scroll as Holocaust Monument, designed By Richard Hess and erected in 1987 outside the 'Judisches Gemendehaus' (Jewish Community Centre) on FasanenStrasse.  The quote next to the shape of the Torah scroll is: "A law is for the citizen and for the stranger that is among you." (Numbers 15:16). Photo: Samuel D. Gruber (1989)

Defeated sinagoga. Sculpture from Trier Cathedral.

I have not read Jacobs book yet, and won't get a chance to do so for awhile, so I re-post here Richard Boffey's detailed review from H-Net.

Richard Boffey review on H-Net of Janet Jacobs, "Memorializing the Holocaust: Gender, Genocide and Collective Memory"

Janet Liebman Jacobs. Memorializing the Holocaust: Gender, Genocideand Collective Memory. London I.B. Tauris, 2010. xxviii + 176 pp.$85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-84885-103-0.
Reviewed by Richard Boffey (University of Leeds)
Published on H-Memory (November, 2011) Commissioned by Catherine Baker

In Memorializing the Holocaust: Gender, Genocide and Collective Memory, Janet Jacobs explores commemoration of the Holocaust in monuments, museums, and memorials through the lens of gender. Jacobs's book investigates how, at a range of sites in Germany and eastern Europe as well as the United States and Australia, gendered visual narratives contribute to traumatic collective memories of violence and genocide. Utilizing what she describes as a blend of cultural studies and visual sociological approaches and also drawing upon Marianne Hirsch and Barbie Zelizer's pioneering work on visual narratives of the Holocaust, Jacobs looks at the ways in which these memorial forms communicate Jewish victimhood. As it turns out, her conclusions paint a rather ambivalent picture of memorialization. [1]Chief amongst her concerns is that the presentation of Jewish men and women along highly stylized gendered lines in the sites she examines might unintentionally "denigrate" (p. 156) the memory of the victims.

Jacobs begins with a short introduction that maps out the efforts made by recent memory studies research to explain the role of the Holocaust in contemporary processes of identity construction. She sees a place for the "memorial scapes" (p. xx) she has studied in propping up an institutionalized, Holocaust-centered memory culture, but rather than look at their role in the politics of memory she focuses specifically on the category of gender at these sites. A theoretical chapter then reflects on her dual role as empathetic female spectator and distanced, critical researcher--a "role conflict" (p. 33) lying at the heart of her ethnographic approach.

In what is a fascinating meditation on this so-called double vision (p. 37), Jacobs considers the ethical implications of a feminist gaze, in particular with regard to its inherent selectivity and inadvertent voyeurism. Might focusing exclusively on representations of women's suffering, she asks, risk reproducing a fetishized gaze drawn to the female body whilst relegating the experiences of men and children to the ethnographic background? Likewise how can Jacobs, a Jewish woman, analyze and photograph these images of atrocity without subjecting herself to a kind of traumatic transference? In answer to the first question, Jacobs has decided also to look at accompanying representations of Jewish masculinity at her research sites in order to mitigate the objectification of her primary research subjects. In answer to the second, she proposes to use her camera and field notes to create an "intellectual space" (p. 38) for managing her emotions and maintaining critical distance.

Jacobs begins the remaining five chapters by discussing the representation of women at the Auschwitz memorial museum. In photos, memorial sculptures, and artifact installations displayed at the site, she discerns a prevalence of maternal imagery on the one hand and sexualized representations of the female body on the other. Whilst the former casts Jewish women as passive victims, the latter turns the act of spectating from remembrance into "sexual objectification" (p. 45). At the Ravensbruck concentration camp memorial, the subject of chapter 3, Jacobs sees a Christianizing frame of remembrance. This is apparent above all in prisoners' depictions of a "woman-made hell" (p. 63) that feature female guards as diabolical tormenters in black capes and in the motif of a martyred female victim that appears in a number of memorials to national prisoner groups.

Chapter 4 deals with German memorials to the 1938 Kristallnacht pogroms. In the memorials Jacobs has surveyed, both this incident and by extension the Holocaust in a broader sense are represented primarily as the destruction of a religion and culture, not as the destruction of a people. Indeed, visual symbols such as a desecrated Torah appear in these memorials with telling frequency. For Jacobs this equates to an "emasculation" of the Jewish sacred text that effectively severs its link to a powerful patriarchal God and reduces the scrolls to a "defeated and ruined female archetype" (p. 102). In this sense, she sees Kristallnacht memorials as unconsciously aping medieval anti-Semitic religious iconography, in which the Jewish synagogue for instance was represented as a defeated and vanquished female figure, Synagoga.

The focus is broadened in chapter 5 to investigate efforts at memorializing medieval and early modern Jewish life in Germany and eastern Europe, thereby situating representations of the Holocaust within a broader language of memorialization. For Jacobs, the effect of drawing attention to pre-genocide Jewry is to exoticize Jewish culture and tradition. As she sees it, the darkened, subterranean exhibition spaces at sites such as the Rashi House Jewish Museum in Worms lends a mix of nostalgic rural pastiche and hints of "Otherness" to depictions of pre-twentieth-century Jewish heritage. The suggestion that this "embed[s] the Jew in a medieval archaeology" (p. 125), facilitating a disidentification on the part of German audiences, is an interesting one. To be sure, this kind of distancing could conceivably smooth over the problematic fact that a great many Jewish Holocaust victims were also Germans--and assimilated Germans at that. But to argue, as Jacobs does, that this actually "re-stigmatizes" the Jews, who can then be "blamed for their own suffering and destruction" (p. 132), unfairly does away with the searching debates conducted within reunified Germany (not to mention those already taking place in the Federal Republic of Germany prior to 1989) that revolve around exactly this issue of German guilt and complicity in the Holocaust.[1]

A concluding chapter analyzes two Holocaust memorial museums outside Europe and also draws together the geographically wide-ranging case studies introduced in preceding chapters. The two sites examined here, one in Melbourne and the other in Indiana, both attest to "women's creativity and vision" (p. 141) insofar as female Holocaust survivors and their relatives had a large hand in founding them. Moreover, they both set the more canonical photographic representations of Jewish victims--groups of Jewish men moments before execution or liberated Jewish women survivors of the concentration camps, for example--against photos of survivors' families that predate the Holocaust. In this way, Jacobs argues, the trope of women's relationships and kinship bonds serves to yoke the memory of observers to the lives of individual Jewish victims. In this familial frame of remembrance, Jacobs sees an alternative approach to the memory of genocide that might avoid the pitfalls of alienation or voyeurism.

It is not until late in the chapter that Jacobs considers whether other visitors to the sites she has surveyed would share her concern at the "unintended consequences of memorialization" (p. 153). If she feels there are unresolved "issues of gender, anti-Semitism, and representations of victimization" (p. 153) at the center of today's collective memory of the Holocaust, then the question of exactly whose collective memory this is remains unanswered. Indeed, Jacobs herself remarks that "it is ... my interpretative framework through which these monuments and sites have been evaluated and understood"(p. xxii). It would have been valuable to hear more about how the (often problematic) tropes and motifs Jacobs has identified are perceived by others. Underdeveloped sections in chapter 3 on ritual patterns of remembrance at Ravensbruck and in chapter 4 concerning the conceptual and financial involvement of Jewish groups in bringing about memorials would suggest a complex landscape of memorial agents and observers. As it is, however, the sites emerge in the narrative as rather static and two-dimensional.

This could also have been avoided with a keener alertness to historical and present-day contexts at certain points, particularly in the chapter on Ravensbruck. Jacobs castigates the memorial site for not explicitly mentioning that the subject of a memorial stone at the crematorium was Jewish. "Because this memorial has been placed at the crematorium," she argues, "the absence of a Jewish narrative is all the more striking and highlights the as yet unresolved issues of Jewish invisibility in German memory" (p. 74). Yet the crematorium at Ravensbruck was not primarily a site of Jewish suffering in the way that the crematoria at extermination camps in occupied eastern Europe were--Jewish inmates made up around 15 percent of the total prisoner population at the former. Collapsing together Jewish suffering and the symbol of the crematorium in this way arguably reduces National Socialist racial policy to its anti-Semitic dimensions, resembling the thrust of Anglo-American "Holocaust Education" discourses that have emerged since the turn of the millennium.[3] Jacobs might have asked whether this context has worked its way into her own analysis.Similarly, she overlooks the ideological function of the "Burdened Woman" statue at Ravensbruck in the German Democratic Republic.Certainly, one can read it as a symbol of Christian maternity, as Jacobs does. But a closer look reveals that, unlike a traditional Pieta, the statue also appears to be striding forward, signifying anew beginning that resonated with the GDR's self-proclaimed antifascist genealogy. Political imperatives therefore also served to marginalize the Jewish Holocaust in this statue.[4]

These criticisms notwithstanding, Janet Jacobs has written a thoughtful and lucid study on Holocaust memorialization. Where the book is most successful is in its exploration of the relationship between memorial and observer, convincingly employing a feminist approach to interrogate the assumption that Holocaust memorials "honor" the memory of victims they purport to commemorate. Future studies in this field will be able to profit from Jacobs's ethical critique and couple it to a more differentiated understanding of collective memory.

Notes

[1]. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Barbie Zelizer, Visual Culture and the Holocaust (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2000).

[2]. These were triggered not least by the publication of Daniel Goldhagen's highly controversial Hitler's Willing Executioners:Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996).

[3]. In particular since the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust, January 26-28, 2000. Seehttp://www.holocausttaskforce.org/.

[4]. See Insa Eschebach, "Soil, Ashes, Commemoration: Processes of Sacralization at the Ravensbruck Former Concentration Camp,"History & Memory 23 (2011): 131-157; 141-142.

Citation: Richard Boffey. Review of Jacobs, Janet Liebman, Memorializing the Holocaust: Gender, Genocide and Collective Memory. H-Memory, H-Net Reviews. November, 2011.URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=3D34573
This work is licensed under a Creative CommonsAttribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United StatesLicense.

Holland: Project to Commemorate Former Jewish Residents

Amsterdam, Holland. Monument to Jewish Resistance in WWII. Photo: Samuel Gruber

Amsterdam homeowners asked to commemorate former Jewish owners

In a new effort to remember the everyday lives of Jews killed in the Holocaust, in the spirit the highly successful German Stolpersteine project ("Stones of the Vanished" or "Stumbling Stones") of which I have previously written, a new effort to mark the houses of former Jewish residents of Holland has been announced. This project is in its infancy and it remains to see what interest and action it will inspire.

In addition to the internationally known Anne Frank House, hone of the most visited tourist sites in Amsterdam; and the Jewish Historical Museum, one of the best Jewish historical and cultural venues in Europe; Amsterdam also already has numerous monuments and plaques marking Jewish heritage and Holocaust sites and and commemorating Holocaust victims. The best on-line guide to the Jewish history of Amsterdam on the museum's website.

The following article is from Associated Press was published in Haaretz:

More than 70 percent of Holland's wartime Jewish population were killed by the Nazis; The dutch will mark the end of the war on May 4 with solemn ceremonies of remembrance.

By The Associated Press

A commemoration committee is asking thousands of Amsterdam homeowners to mark their houses if a former Jewish resident was arrested or deported to Nazi death camps during World War II.

The May 4-5 Committee, named for the date of the Netherlands' liberation from German occupation in 1945, made posters available Friday for display in windows of the former Jewish homes.

The poster reads: "1 of the 21,662 houses where Jews lived who were murdered in World War II."

Residents can look on the committee's website to see if their house had been occupied by a Jewish family during the war and the names of the people who had lived there.

More than 70 percent of Holland's wartime Jewish population were killed by the Nazis. The Dutch mark the end of the war on May 4 with solemn ceremonies of remembrance, followed the next day by parties and music to mark Liberation Day.

The poster was the initiative of Frits Rijksbaron, a marketing executive who discovered the title deed to his new home showed that it had once belonged to a Jewish family.

He told Dutch broadcaster NOS that he hoped to remind Amsterdam's citizens of the horrors of the Nazis' sweep of their city, during which some 61,700 Jews were arrested and killed.

He wanted "to show how big a trauma it was for the Jews and for Amsterdam, and how Jewish Amsterdam was."

Holocaust Memorials: More on Stumbling Blocks (Stolpersteine)

Holocaust Memorials: More on Stumbling Blocks (Stolpersteine)
by Samuel D. Gruber

(ISJM) I have written in the past about the Stolpersteine project ("Stones of the Vanished" or "Stumbling Stones") which began in Germany, and has now spread to many countries. The project, originated in 1994 in Cologne by artist Gunter Demnig, embeds small stones resembling cobbles, in the pavements near houses where Jews lived before their deportation out of Germany, or to their deaths.

There have been many stories in the press about the project - which to my mind is one of the most effective acts of Holocaust remembrance created. It is at the same time obvious and brilliant. It brings the act of memory into everyday life, and it reminds us that unexpected events - including the banal and horrific - can occur, or at least appear to us, at almost any time. We should seek to remember something or someone, from the past, every day.

Here is a link to recent story by Winston Pickett about the Stolpersteine project from the Jewish Chronicle.

Romania: Iasi Holocaust Victims Reburied

Romania: Iasi Holocaust Victims Reburied

AFP reported on April 4, 2011 the following story of the reburial in the Jewish cemetery of Iasi, Romania, of the remains of about 40 Jewish Holocaust victims. The reburial is significant for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that the victims were the first found in a mass grave in Romania since 1945 - despite the widespread belief that many such graves exist. Romania's long-standing official reluctance about pursuing Holocaust history is well known.

Elsewhere in Europe more concerted efforts are in progress to identify such graves - but these efforts, too, are often hampered by mixed local sensibilities about confronting the past and priorities about the future.

The second issue involves how to treat such graves when found. Many observant Jews prefer, and many insist, that graves be undisturbed, but marked and in some way consecrated and protected; in essence making every mass grave a Jewish cemetery. This follows Jewish law and tradition, and does not "disturb the dead."

On the other hand there are many who insist and require - for legal and historical reasons - that such graves when found be investigated, which usually mean the exhumation of the dead in order to try to describe the crime and identify the victims. Sometimes this is required to ascertain the fact that the victims were in fact Jews - or all Jews - something that in many cases, however, can never be fully known. A new field of forensic anthropology has developed in recent years specializing in such work - the result of horrific crimes in countries around the world. Following this scenario, Jewish communities usually prefer to see the exhumed remains reburied in Jewish cemeteries with other Jews in already consecrated ground, though for some Orthodox Jews the fear of interring a non-Jew in a Jewish cemetery is also a concern. Historical markers recounting the circumstances of their murders can still be placed at the mass grave site. The speed with which investigation and reburial is carried out can also become a contentious issue.

In Jewish history there are many precedents for the removal and reburial of human remains in order to protect them from destruction or to reunite them. Usually such removals and reburials follow prescribed procedures under rabbinic supervision, but truthfully, most of these are of fairly recent invention. How bodies were dealt with in the past in times of oppression and duress, and in times of communal recovery, is not fully known.

One thing that all sides agree on - is that graves of the dead need to marked in some way. Historians and archaeologists want the events of the past to be remembered. Observant Jews want to respect the dead, and also provided a warning to those (such as Cohanim) who cannot come in contact with the dead.

Dozens of Holocaust victims laid to rest in Romania

by: Isabelle Wesselingh

Rabbis from Britain and the United States bury on April 4, 2011 in the town of Iasi, 410 kms north of Bucharest, some 40 Jews killed during the Holocaust and found in November 2010 in a mass grave in the northeastern Romanian village of Popricani.

The remains of about 40 Jews killed during the Holocaust and found in a mass grave were laid to rest Monday in an emotion-filled ceremony in northeastern Romania. Five rabbis from Britain and the United States performed the funeral service under a grey and cloudy sky. Dressed in black, they carried the remains, unidentified and contained in paper bags and cardboard boxes, and put them into a single grave in the Jewish cemetery of Iasi, overlooking the city. "We have come here to help these people rest in peace. We believe it is God's will", British rabbi Meir Twersky, whose grand-parents are buried in Iasi cemetery, told AFP. "We are gathered here today to remember these men, women and children who were brutally murdered in a forest in 1941 (...) only because they were Jews", Israel's ambassador to Romania, Dan Ben-Eliezer, said during the official ceremony.

According to the Elie Wiesel National Institute, the victims were killed in the summer of 1941 at Popricani, close to Iasi, by the Romanian army, an ally of the Nazis during World War II. They were among more than 15,000 Jews killed in Iasi during pogroms in 1941. A Romanian historian, Adrian Cioflanca, found the site thanks to the testimonies of Romanians who had witnessed the killings. "We will continue the historical research in order to try to determine where the victims came from, whether it was from Iasi or the surrounding villages", the director of the Elie Wiesel Institute, Alexandru Florian, told AFP.

The exact number of victims, including women and children, has not been determined, but Cioflanca told AFP, "We found the skulls of at least 35 people but there were other body parts so we can talk about at least 40 people." The victims were buried just a few metres (yards) away from thousands more Jews killed during the pogroms. "I ask the forgiveness of the deceased for the suffering that has been brought to their holy bones", rabbi Meir Schlesinger said, referring to the belief that the remains should have been left where they were originally found. But Abraham Ghiltman, the president of the Iasi Jewish community, said it was a "relief" to see "those whose memory was forgotten" to be lying next to their fellow citizens in the Jewish cemetery. "We hope that the events we witnessed during the Holocaust will never happen again, neither in Romania nor in the rest of the world", he added.

According to an international commission of historians led by Nobel Peace laureate Elie Wiesel, himself a Romanian-born Jew, between 280,000 and 380,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews were killed in territories run by the pro-Nazi Romanian regime during 1940-1944. The Popricani mass grave is the first to be discovered since 1945, when 311 corpses were exhumed from three locations in Stanca Roznovanu, close to Iasi, according to the Wiesel Institute.

Macedonia: Holocaust Memorial Museum Opened

Skopje, Macedonia. scenes from the inauguration of the new Holocaust Museum. Photos from web.

Blagoj Gjorcev, 92, looks at portraits of Macedonian Jews killed during the opening ceremony of the Holocaust memorial center for the Jews of Macedonia in Skopje Photograph by: OGNEN TEOFILOVSKI REUTERS, AFP.

Macedonia: Holocaust Memorial Museum Opened

In a recent post I mentioned the new Holocaust museums in Skokie and Los Angeles. I should also have mentioned the new center in Skopje, Macedonia. There, the actual and remembered history and landscape are quite different than in U.S. cities - where they have been more survivors living, but where many remade lives far from the site of community destruction. In Macedonia, a small country with few Jews, a large new center has risen on the site of the Jewish ghetto.

Last month a Holocaust museum and educational center was dedicated in the former Jewish quarter of Skopje, Republic of Macedonia. The project had been announced with great hoopla in 2005 in a public ceremony involving the Macedonian President and Prime Minister among others, with an anticipated completion date of 2006 or 2007. as with many such projects that have to negotiate a complex financial, political, aesthetic and historical path; things took longer.

'The Memorial Holocaust Centre, in a symbolic way, will bring the victims of Treblinka home to Macedonia', said Prime Minister Buckovski, after laying the center's cornerstone.

According to Katherine Clarke writing in The Forward:

Co-curator Yitzchak Mais, who was previously director of Yad Vashem and founding curator of New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage, terms the special exhibit accompanying the opening a “cultural insight into a dynamic Jewish world that was destroyed.” He stated that the exhibit, which features hours of interviews with Macedonian Jews, “focuses on Macedonian Jewry before the Holocaust, on forgotten history, and on tremendous stories of Jewish vitality and vibrancy wiped out by external causes."

The official celebrations marked only the first phase of the center. A special children’s museum will open in the complex in March 2012, to be followed by the permanent exhibition, in March 2013. The completion of all phases of the project coincides with “Skopje 2014,” a $273 million initiative to transform the city into a competitive European capital and rebuild its infrastructure after a 1963 earthquake that destroyed about 80% of the city’s architecture.

Not everyone is pleased with the memorial.

An article in Macedonia Daily addresses some of the very real concerns of people in Macedonia - including some Jews - about the cost and scope of the project at a time when other infrastructure in thew country needs costly attention.

The Holocaust Center also illustrates a recent trend in Macedonia to more strongly assert the country’s identity as an independent nation. The project dovetails conveniently, for example, with Skopje 2014, the government’s controversial, $273 million plan to transform the city from a provincial seat into a full-fledged European capital.

The center and Skopje 2014 are technically unrelated. But if the center is completed next year, as expected, and Skopje 2014 remains on schedule, the new center will eventually stand in a radically redesigned downtown, near a new Macedonian history museum, new national theater, a massive triumphal arch and other proposed monuments.

Taxpayers are footing the bill for Skopje 2014, making it a subject for public debate. The center’s costs, alternatively, are covered by a special fund created in 2000 from the assets of Macedonian Jewish families who perished in the Holocaust and left no heirs. But critics within the Jewish community nonetheless link the two, arguing the center’s backers are overreaching in the same way the government is trying to do too much with Skopje 2014.

“It’s become big, maybe too big,” said Samuel Sadikario, a former president of the Holocaust Fund, a quasi-public organization that administers the center’s budget. “Maybe such a project should be done in Poland.”

Located on a 30,000-square-foot parcel near the River Vardar, in Skopje’s former Jewish quarter, the Holocaust Memorial Center will commemorate the 7,200 souls sent to the Treblinka death camp in 1943, when Nazi-ally Bulgaria occupied Macedonia, then part of Yugoslavia. The $23-million center is slated to contain a museum, arts center and hotel.

About 220 Jews remain in Macedonia, too few to merit a grand center, said Sadikario. He thought the millions invested in the project might be better spent on Macedonia’s crumbling universities. He also noted that construction was supposed to finish two years ago, but has been repeatedly delayed by the Jewish leaders struggling to manage the project.

“There is no capacity,” Sadikario said. “Judaism is actually dying out in Macedonia. It’s not too much to say its dead."

Others, however, consider this a "world-class" museum and look forward to it becoming a destination - helping to put Skopje on the travel map.

Here is the report posted by the World Jewish Congress:

Macedonia praised for honoring its Jews at opening of Holocaust memorial museum

11 March 2011

A museum dedicated to the memory of the Jews of Macedonia who perished in the Shoah has been inaugurated in the former Yugoslav republic, in the presence of the country’s president and representatives of international Jewish organizations, including the World Jewish Congress (WJC). In his speech, the WJC’s Research Director Laurence Weinbaum pointed out that no Jewish community in Europe had suffered a greater degree of destruction than the Macedonian one. Referring to Macedonia's principled stand on the restitution issue and to its unwavering friendship with Jews and Israel, he said: "In much of contemporary Europe, dead Jews are respected, but live ones are defamed. You honor the dead and the living, and in so doing you have set an example to which other nations should aspire. There are nations that are larger, richer, better known and more powerful than Macedonia, but none more decent, gracious, good-hearted and noble.”

In a video message to the event, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that "this museum and memorial will document the long and rich history of Jewish life in the Balkans and honor the memories of those who perished in the Holocaust. Schoolchildren and visitors from throughout the region will be able to see their faces, hear their stories, and learn about their lives. The government of Macedonia has shown real leadership by enacting legislation resolving compensation claims for Jewish property stolen during the Holocaust and supporting the establishment of this memorial and museum. And today your entire nation can be proud of this effort." The modern, multi-million dollar edifice stands in the heart of what was once the city's Jewish Quarter, in the center of the Macedonian capital Skopje. It was built by the Jewish community of Macedonia, which today numbers some 100 members. Macedonian Jewry benefited from a 2002 law providing for the return of heirless Jewish property, a law that is widely recognized as one of the best in Europe.

"The only surviving member of the 81-strong Misrahi family was my father," Viktor Misrahi (pictured on the left), one of the few Macedonian survivors still alive, told the news agency AFP. "Today, the ashes of our people were brought back here from Treblinka and they will remain here, at their home," he added. At the ceremony, Macedonia was hailed for enabling the Jews to regain the assets they had lost in the Shoah. The cornerstone for the museum was laid in 2005. Ljiljana Mizrahi, president of the local Holocaust Fund that had initiated the project, opened the ceremony by reading the names of some of the victims and explained that the museum would "preserve the memory of the Jews of Macedonia, not only commemorate their deaths, but also their lives and the civilization that perished with them."

In his address, Macedonian President Gjorje Ivanov recalled the long history of co-habitation between Jews and Macedonians of other faiths and said that with the loss of the Jews "a part of Macedonia had been torn out and that on the Jewish streets of Skopje, Bitola and Stip, after the war there was silence." He went on to note Macedonia's support for Israel, which he said would continue.

In April 1941, Macedonia - then a part of Yugoslavia - was occupied by Bulgarian troops. In contrast to its policy back home, Sofia instituted a regime of terror and plunder against Macedonian Jews. That policy culminated in the deportation in March 1943 of some 7,200 Jews to the German death camp at Treblinka, from which not a single one returned. Some 98 percent of the Jews were killed. The only survivors were those who had managed to evade deportation, many of whom fought with the partisans.

Also, Read the AFP story here.

For more on Jewish sites in Macedonia click here.

Rothstein, Wecker (& Gruber) on Holocaust Museums

Los Angeles, Ca. Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. Photos: Samuel Gruber (2011)

Rothstein, Wecker (& Gruber) on Holocaust Museums
by Samuel D. Gruber

The New York Times recently ran a thoughtful and thorough review of the new Holocaust Museum in Los Angeles. Unlike several previous articles in other publications that deal mostly with the architecture – or architecture as landscape – Edward Rothstein mostly discusses the exhibitions, presentation and tries to find underlining themes and messages beyond the specifics of Holocaust chronology and the generalities that such an event should happen “Never Again.” In an on-line post-script to the times articles Menachem Wecker has posted related piece in the Houston Chronicle. Both articles ask the question are there too many Holocaust Museums? (and perhaps by extension, too much Holocaust?), and more delicately, what is the role of a Holocaust Museum so many years after the main event, and especially now as the last generation of survivors ages and dies.

Both authors see the continued need for Holocaust education, and the role museums can play. And yet as Rothstein says, despite all the new museums “at the same time exaggerated and wrong-headed Holocaust and Nazi analogies have proliferated at an even greater rate than the museums themselves. It is as if familiarity is breeding analogy, and analogy is unaffected by how many institutions.”

Of course it is foolish to think museums are going to stop intolerance. At best they can provide the information and narrative needs for individuals and groups to defend against ludicrous denials, and to take the offensive to teach a new generation. Even the best museums – as places one chooses to go to – are essentially passive and reactive. Museums need the response of the individual mind and heart to “turn on” what they offer. Museums can be repositories of memory, but they are not memory themselves any more than a hard drive full of stored data represents real intelligence and knowledge. But the need for such repositories is essential; they are the well to which thinking people must continually return to confront horrible truths.

Should Holocaust Museums be changing? The first were opened decades ago in a pre-digital age. Museums must, of course, keep up with the times in order to maintain and expand their audience. But unlike many museums, Holocaust museums were founded on a moral truth, with a moral center. They must not deviate from this, they must not dilute their story, they must not pander for audience and commercialize their content. Holocaust museums occupy a borderland on the edge of sacred space but dangerously close to entertainment centers. It is a line that is crossed at great peril. Our recent and ongoing wars have already been turned into video games. What next? Curators beware.

MUSEUM REVIEW; Bearing Witness Beyond the Witnesses

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN (March 24, 2011), The New York Times

LOS ANGELES -- Is the Holocaust too much with us? Or if not the Holocaust, then Holocaust museums?

It can sometimes seem so. The Association of Holocaust Organizations has 293 institutional members around the world, each at least partly devoted to commemoration. The association counts 16 major Holocaust museums in the United States, in Richmond, Houston, New York, Washington and other cities to which Jewish survivors immigrated after World War II. And they are still being built. Two years ago the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center opened near Chicago. And last fall the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust opened here in a new $15.5 million building. It is actually the city's second such museum; the other, the Museum of Tolerance, examines the Holocaust's connection to its main theme and welcomes 350,000 visitors a year.

But the answer to these questions is not easy for it seems that while almost all of these institutions have developed out of the desires of survivors to offer testimony, command remembrance, educate the young and ensure that nothing similar occurs, at the same time exaggerated and wrong-headed Holocaust and Nazi analogies have proliferated at an even greater rate than the museums themselves. It is as if familiarity is breeding analogy, and analogy is unaffected by how many institutions meticulously survey the horrors of calculated, systematic murder on a mass scale. The new museum here, in Pan Pacific Park, not far from the traditionally Jewish district of Fairfax Avenue, should not, of course, bear the brunt of these broodings. It does, however, in its successes and failures, indicate some of the challenges that will face Holocaust museums when there are no longer any remaining survivors and they commemorate a receding historical trauma.

The Holocaust museum here is a strange hybrid, for not only is it the country's newest, it is also, its literature asserts, the oldest, tracing its origins to 1961, when a group of survivors studying English as a Second Language at Hollywood High School decided it would be important to display some of the objects that had survived with them and that might, in a museum setting, bear witness.

Read the Whole Story Here

Skokie, Illinois. Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center. Photos: Samuel Gruber (2010)

Experts: Don't say 'never again' to Holocaust museums

By Menachem Wecker (March 31, 2011) Houston Chronicle

Must Holocaust museums evolve as they approach an age without any living survivors? As the Nazis recede further into the past, is there a danger of museums devoted to Holocaust memory becoming static?A recent New York Times article by Edward Rothstein raised these provocative questions and has some experts worried about the view that Holocaust museums need to become more than one-trick ponies.

"When you say that a Holocaust museum must not be static you're implying, very strongly, that being static is bad," says Walter Reich, former director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Stagnancy could mean bankruptcy for clothing designers, but what's true of fashion isn't true about the "catastrophic vulnerabilities of human nature," says Reich, now a professor at George Washington University.

"That history and those vulnerabilities are fundamentally static," he says. "It should be portrayed in a way that depicts exactly what happened. It should not become a vessel for current trends, concerns or fashions and should not stop being a museum about a discrete historical event."

Ira Perry, director of marketing and public relations at the Holocaust Museum Houston, agreed.

"Holocaust museums do not necessarily need to evolve into something else," he said. "They serve a distinct role in honoring the victims' histories and the survivors' legacies."

Read the whole story here.

Also Gavriel Rosenfeld's October 2010 review of the Los Angeles Museum's architecture, publishing the The Forward, before the official opening.

Stealth Museum

The New Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust Gives New Meaning to Green Architecture

Poland: Reopening of Restored Zamosc with Conference April 5-7, 2011

Zamosc, Poland. Synagogue after present restoration.
Photos: Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland.

Poland: Reopening of Restored Zamosc with Conference April 5-7, 2011
by Samuel D. Gruber

The restored Renaissance synagogue in Zamosc, one of the finest surviving synagogue buildings in Poland, will reopen on April 5th in conjunction with the conference “History and Culture of the Jews of Zamosc and the Zamosc Region.” The synagogue, unlike the Jews of Zamosc, survived the Holocaust and was used as a public library during much of Poland's Communist period. Unlike many other Jewish communal and religious buildings transformed for new use after World War II, the Zamosc synagogue retained many original features, including its built-in masonry and plastic Aron-ha kodesh (Ark) frame. The building was long recognized as a polish architectural monument and so a wealth of photographic and descriptive information from before 1939 survives informing us about the history, art and architecture of the building.

Zamosc, Poland. Synagogue interior during interwar years from Loukomski, Jewish Art in European Synagogues.

The Renaissance planned town of Zamosc is one of the most picturesque towns in Poland and one of the most important intact sites in the early history of European urban planning. Thus, it has been and continues to be a destination for specialized scholars and for Polish and international tourists. I first visited Zamosc in 1990 when surveying surviving synagogue buildings in Poland for the World Monuments Fund. Since compared to other synagogues in Poland at that time Zamosc was in extremely good condition, we did not list it as a preservation priority. I am happy that now, two decades later, WMF has continued to show interest in the building and contributed along with other international donors to the restoration. I include some of my photos from that first visit - when the sight of the Italian Renaissance inspired synagogue and the entire town was a revelation to me.

Zamosc, Poland. Synagogue in 1990. Photos: Samuel D. Gruber/World Monuments Fund

Photos and description of the restoration process and the finished buildings can be seen here.

The restitution of the synagogue to the Jewish community of Poland through the administration of the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Monuments in Poland has allowed its repair and extensive restoration to return Jewish identity to the structure. Importantly, by rededicating the building as a synagogue but also establishing it as a regional Jewish information and tourist center, it returns easy access to Jewish history and identity to the town, and creates a larger venue for both commemoration of the past and introduction and consideration of contemproary Jewish religious and cultural identity.

This process begins this week with the conference that is co-organized by the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland and the Polish-Jewish Literature Studies of the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin. The program of the conference which is in Polish and thus (appropriately) directed to a Polish audience can be seen here.

No doubt, in the future, there will be other meetings, symposia and conferences international in scope.

The synagogue has been restored by the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland within the framework of the project “Revitalization of the Renaissance synagogue in Zamosc for the needs of the Chassidic Route and the local community”. The project received a grant from Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway through the EEA Financial Mechanism and the Norwegian Financial Mechanism. The restoration of the synagogue is part of the Foundation's broad program of care for otherwise orphaned Jewish historic sites, including its designation as a hub for the "Chassidic Route". Ironically, as is made clear in the text of the informative and lavishly illustrated brochure: “Revitalization of the Renaissance synagogue in Zamosc for the needs of the Chassidic Route and the local community” , Zamosc was never a ccenter of Hasidism. It is really an opportunity to make the point that there was a widespread Jewish presence before and during the Hasidic period that had its own roots and development, and is, i think, much more relevant for defining a Jewish role in the modern world.

I quote from the brochure:

In Poland in the second half of the 18th c. Unlike the smaller communities surrounding Zamość, where Chassidism found many supporters, the capital of the Entail became a significant anti-Chassidic center. Not coincidentally, it was the hometown of Rabbi Ezriel Halevi Horowitz, a major critic of Chassidism and opponent of Rabbi Jacob Isaac Horowitz, known as “The Seer of Lublin” – the famous leader of the Lublin Chassidim. In the first half of the 19th c., there were only two small Chassidic groups in Zamość, consisting of followers of the Tzadik of Góra Kalwaria and the Tzadik of Bełz.

The community’s rejection of Chassidism was likely due to the attitude of its traditional elite and well-educated rabbis, one of whom was Rabbi Israel Ben Moshe Halevi Zamość. A philosopher and mathematician, he became well-known throughout Europe, and was notably the teacher of Moses Mendelssohn, the famous thinker and precursor of the Haskalah. The Haskalah (Hebrew for “Enlightenment”) was a pan-European movement which evolved in the Jewish circles of Western Europe. Its proponents called for the renouncement of isolationism and the involvement of Jews in the social and political life of the countries they inhabited. At the end of the 18th century, Zamość became one of the most important centers of the Haskalah in the region.

Activities at the restored synagogue will also involve local partner the Artistic Exhibitions Agency, the Fine Arts High School, the Karol Namyslowski Symphonic Orchestra, the Zamość University of Management and Administration and the Catholic University of Lublin as well as the Jewish Community of Trondheim, Norway.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

The synagogue will also be available for religious services. Opening hours: beginning with April 8th, 2011 the "Synagogue" Center will be open from Tuesday to Sunday, from 10.00 am to 6.00 pm.

The Holocaust in Zamosc

The fate of Zamosc's Jews in the Holocaust, which will be the main subject of one day of the conferecne on April 7, is briefly described by Stefan Krakowski in the Encyclopedia Judaica:

After a few days of heavy bombardment, which especially damaged the Jewish quarter, the German army entered Zamosc on Sept. 14, 1939. Immediately after capturing the city, the Germans organized a series of pogroms, motivated in part by the desire to loot Jewish property. On Sept. 26, 1939, the Germans left Zamosc and the Soviet army entered, but handed the city back to the Germans two weeks later, in accordance with the new Soviet-German demarcation line. About 5,000 Jews left the city at the time that the Soviet army withdrew. The remaining Jewish population suffered Nazi brutality and persecutions, like the rest of the Jews throughout Lublin province.

In October 1939 the Germans selected a *Judenrat and forced it to pay a "contribution" of 100,000 zlotys ($20,000) and the daily delivery of 250 Jews for hard labor. In December 1939 several hundred Jews expelled from *Lodz, Kalo, and *Wloclawek in western Poland were settled in Zamosc. Early in the spring of 1941 an open ghetto was established around Hrubieszowska Street, and the first deportation from Zamosc took place on April 11, 1942 (on the eve of Passover). The entire Jewish population was ordered to gather in the city's market, whereupon gunfire was directed at the crowd killing hundreds on the spot. About 3,000 Jews were forced to board waiting trains which took them to *Belzec death camp. From May 1 to 3, 1942, about 2,100 Jews from *Dortmund, Germany, and from Czechoslovakia were taken to Zamosc. Almost all of them were deported to Belzec on May 27 and murdered. The third mass deportation started on Oct. 16, 1942. All Jews were again ordered to gather in the city's market, and afterward were driven to *Izbica, some 15½ mi. (25 km.) from Zamosc. Many were shot on the way, and the rest, after a short stay in Izbica, were deported to Belzec and murdered. In this deportation the Jews offered passive resistance and hundreds went into hiding in prepared shelters. The Germans brought in Polish firemen to open the shelters by destroying the walls and removing other obstacles. Several hundred Jews were discovered in hiding and imprisoned for eight days in the city's cinema hall without food or water; then all those who were still alive were brought to the Jewish cemetery and executed.

A few hundred Jews fled to the forests. Most of them crossed the Bug River, made contact with Soviet guerrillas in the Polesie forest, and joined various local partisan groups. After the war some 300 Jews settled in Zamosc (270 from the Soviet Union, and 30 survivors of the Holocaust in Zamosc), but after a short stay they all left Poland.