Jewish War Memorials

Venice, Italy. New Jewish Cemetery on the Lido, Memorial to Jewish soldiers killed in WW I.
Photos: Samuel D. Gruber, 2006.

Malady Boleslav, Czech Republic. Monument in Jewish cemetery to Jewish soldiers who died in WW I.
Photo: Samuel D. Gruber, 2009.

Gyongyos, Hungary. World War I Memorial in Jewish Cemetery.
Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2005.

Jewish War Memorials
by Samuel D. Gruber

(ISJM) Today is Memorial Day in the United States. It's a holiday that began after the Civil War as Decoration Day to commemorate those who died - on both sides of the conflict - during that long and bloody confrontation. Jews, too, died for the North and South. And there were Jewish civilian casualties as well. I'm thinking of a little girl's grave I once saw in Vicksburg, Mississippi. She was a casualty of the Union shelling of the Confederate town. I have a slide of that somewhere, but it is not digitized, so its posting will have to await another time. I know there are memorials to American Jewish soldiers in synagogues and cemeteries across the country, but I have not made a point of collecting these.

I recall with sadness seeing almost 20 years ago the marble memorial plaques left behind by a congregation on Coney Island when they abandoned their old synagogue - and let it fall into ruin. At that time I couldn't find any musuem or archive interested in rescuing these heavy marble plaques. I assume they were later destroyed with the building. I'm going to keep my eyes open now for other examples, and I encourage my readers to send me examples they know.

Meanwhile, I'm posting some Jewish war memorials in Europe I have visited recently - since the advent of digital photography. Here are examples of monuments to Jewish soldiers who died in the First World War from cemeteries in just three countries - Italy, the Czech Republic and Hungary. There remains a common misconception that Jews were frequent draft-dodgers from this conflict. These monuments tell a different story. I know many more such monuments exist throughout Europe and I think it important to inventory and document these. Besides being an act of rescuing a little remembered history, and of remembering the fallen themselves, this collection is an interesting and valuable reminder of an already begun process of artistically distinctive commemorative monuments made by Jews in the years before the Holocaust. This is a tradition that was then revived immediately after the Holocaust by survivors, and then again on a large scale in more recent decades.

Happily, all three of these monuments are in cemeteries that are now well cared for. The great one of the noble lion pierced by spears is from the Hungarian town of Gyongyos, where the cemetery was restored since this photo was taken (it was part of a reconnaissance project prior to finding a donor). There is also a large and impressive Holocaust memorial on the site.

Add-on:

Ruth Gruber has posted more examples of Jewish War Monuments on her blog. Click here.

Exhibition: Arbit Blatas in New York

Exhibition: Centennial Exhibit in NYC of Arbit Blatas, Paris School Painter Known for Venice Holocaust Monument

An exhibition in New York at the Brookdale Center of Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC – JIR) celebrates the Centennial of the birth of Lithuania-born Jewish artist Arbit Blatas (1908-1999), once a prominent member of the pre-World War II “Paris School” of painters, and in later life known for his series of bronze bas-reliefs that comprise the Holocaust memorial in Campo del Ghetto Nuovo in Venice, Italy (1980, 1993). The reliefs commemorate the night of Dec. 5, 1943, when the first 200 of the city's Jews were rounded up and deported to their deaths, but also retell in a more inclusive history of Holocaust suffering.

Blatas also prepared the black and white drawings used to introduce segments of the 1978 television series 'Holocaust,'' which changed the way the Holocaust was discussed in Europe, and also made Blatas’s work known to millions.

The HUC – JIR exhibition includes one of four castings of the The Monument to the Holocaust, which has been donated by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to the permanent collection of HUC - JIR. With these, are also exhibited a series of large vividly colored and dramatically staged oil paintings mostly contemporary with the bronzes that represent similar scenes of oppression and destruction. An earlier painting from 1944, an immensely powerful painting titled “Babi Yar,” was done in a strongly expressionistic style and dramatically depicts the orgy of violence with a force equal to some of the medieval depictions of the Massacre of the Innocents (see photo).Besides being the strongest painting in the exhibition, it is a rare depiction of the horrors of the Holocaust made so close in time to the actual events. Most artists of the period (as has been described by Matthew Baigell and others) confronted the reported horrors with symbolic, mythological or historical language.

A Blatas, worked in Paris from 1919 until he was forced to flee Europe to America in 1941. In the last decades of his life he has a studio in Venice, a city where the light and architecture encouraged his rich glowing palette. A second part of the exhibition focuses on Blatas’s more exuberant work of happier themes – Venice and the Opera. Blatas was married to Regina Resnick, an opera singer and stage director. Together, in the 1970s and 1980s, they created sets and costumes for many of the world’s major opera houses. Paintings based on these designs are included, as well as cityscapes of Venice and elsewhere that are pictorial essays in saturated color.



Blatas’s Venice monument originated with the artist himself. As a Jew who lost his mother and many friends and relatives in the Holocaust he felt a special need to commemorate the events of suffering. As a lover of Venice, he conceived of the monument as a gift to the city. The monument is unlike most Holocaust monuments made up to that time. It is neither heroic nor symbolic. It has none of the heroic grandeur of the work of Nathan Rappoport (Warsaw Ghetto Uprisng Monument), or of the East German sculptors at Buchenwald. Instead, Blatos followed an the old tradition of a sequence of narrative reliefs – a tradition rooted in the triumphal arches of ancient Rome, and in bronzes doors of medieval (S. Zeno, Verona) and Renaissance (Baptistery, Florence). One sees echoes of battles scenes from the column of Trajan and the poignant heroism of Ghiberti’s Sacrifice of Isaac (Akedah). The finish is rough and battered, giving these panels a painful immediacy that links the viewer to the timeless scenes. In 1980, seven panels were placed next to the wall of the Casa di Riposo Israelitica (Jewish Old Age Home), near the spot where the Jews of Venice were collected before their deportation. A separate panel, the Last Train, was placed alone and was unveiled in the presence of the president of Italy in 1993.

Blatas made four sets of these bronze reliefs. He also provided one set for the Shrine of the Unknown Jewish Martyr in the Marais, Paris (1981). Another was made for the former site of the Anti-Defamation League in New York at Dag Hammerskjold Plaza (1982). These are in the exhibition. A fourth set was installed at the Ninth Fort, outside his native Kaunas, Lithuania, after his death in 2003.

For more views of the Venice monuments click here.