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.

Two Grubers on Holocaust Memory in Eastern Europe

Two Grubers on Holocaust Memory in Eastern Europe

Ruth Ellen Gruber has written an overview article for JTA about Holocaust accountability in Europe in the 20 years since the fall of Communism. Click here read column: "In Eastern Europe, advances toward accountability but more to do," by Ruth Ellen Gruber (October 28, 2009).

Ruth interviewed me for the article. Its a topic that we discuss frequently. In looking over my extended comments (which Ruth herself could have made since due to our shared experiences our views are very close) I thought them worth sharing. As always, I appreciate, readers' reactions and comment.

Interview with Samuel Gruber about Holocaust Memory After Communism (Oct 20, 2009):

REG: Which [former Communist] states have made most progress coming to terms with this?

Sam Gruber: When talking about Holocaust recognition and commemoration, all progress is relative. Some countries are much further along the path to historical accountability and sincere commemoration than others, but many have had further to come. Some countries are deeply divided with more liberal and internationally leaning political movements ready to discuss crimes of the past, while more right wing and nationalist parties feel that to do so is a form of self-hatred and near treasonous behavior.

In all former Communist countries it has been necessary to overturn a half century of misinformation, and in many cases outright denial of many of the most basic facts of the Holocaust. Those countries which suffered the most under the Nazis - especially Poland and the Czech Republic - were most ready to accept the worst about them, and to acknowledge of horrors of the Holocaust. Those countries where wartime governments collaborated with Germany - such as Latvia and Romania have had a harder time, for to acknowledge Nazi crimes was in effect to acknowledge their own complicity. In the Baltic it has been even more complex, since throughout the decades of Soviet occupation the Nazis continued to be seen as liberators against the Russians by nationalists in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Holocaust history was mostly irrelevant in the years of anti-Communist nationalists.

Thus, to say it is difficult to say who has made the most progress. A small movement to recognize the historic truth of the Holocaust and to commemorate victims in a place like Latvia, and to acknowledge local collaboration, is to me as much progress, as has been done on the monument at Rumbula, is to my as much progress a large monument being erected in Poland, where all Poles see themselves as victims of the Nazis, and most are ready to accept the Jews as victims, too...albeit not always as a separate case.

REG: What are the problem areas and why?

Sam Gruber: There are problems on three levels.

First, there is the problem of obtaining and confirming information about the Holocaust in particularly places. The more the local resistance to accepting the Holocaust as fact; the more important it is to be precise in the information that is presented.

Second, there is the problem of disseminating information. For the most part the hardest populations to reach - and these are also sometimes the very ones that harbor traditional stereotypical notions of Jews (and others) - are those that only communicate in their local language. These populations tend to be the most traditional, the most parochial, the least educated, the least traveled and probably the most religious, where religion has retaken a hold. It has been slow going for international Holocaust education groups to prepare and disseminate materials in local languages, or to do it enough to combat the abundance of locally produced anti-Semitic and Holocaust denial material in these same countries. Local leadership is very important in acknowledging and commemorating the Holocaust. Mayors, teachers, priest, national leaders really can set the tone and established a better climate for education and dialogue.

REG: What are some of best practice examples?

Sam Gruber: I think the monument at Buchenwald in Germany, which tells the story of the Little Camp fully, and in sharp evocative language, and in many languages, is very successful. Because the monument was designed by a survivor of the camp it has special power. Its simplicity is a virtue. The monuments at the killing fields of Rumbula and Bikierniki Forest outside of Riga are also very moving, and very well done. Meanwhile, however, there are inadequate markers at sites within the city itself. I still find the Umschlagplatz monument in Warsaw very moving, though it requires some previous knowledge of the history of the site. The cemetery monument at Kazimierz Dolny, built in the 1980s, and the extensive monument at the Death Camp of Treblinka; also continue to serve well, though it may be time in both cases to add more explanatory and educational material. Not immediately as part of the artistic monuments, but nearby.

Usually monuments that are destinations can be more symbolic, since it is usually assumed the visitor knows something or otherwise would not have come. Markers that appear in unexpected places, on buildings and streets, need to provide more information. Monuments such as that in Bratislava are, as I have previously written, unsuccessful because they mark a place but do not tell a story. They can serve as backdrops for scheduled commemorative events, but otherwise they serve little purpose. This is always the danger of the most official monuments – government sponsors always prefer to be vague – and not to alienate any constituency.

REG: Have some states taken the right steps only to reverse them?

Sam Gruber: It has to be understood that education is a slow process, and that changing inherited and accepted concepts and beliefs is a difficult task in any context. In this light, I think we can look at amazing progress over the past two decades. At the very time that most former Communist countries were grappling with them most challenging problems of nation building, identify, democratization and economic transformation, they have also changed many attitudes about the Jewish past in general, and the events of the Holocaust. In many of these places, even the concept of a Holocaust separate from the devastation of the Great Patriotic War [World War II] had previous been unknown. The greatest willingness to consider, and even accept a basic history of the Holocaust has been greatest in those countries most closely associated with the West. It has been part of the process of granting democratic rights and religious freedom. It has also been the result of Eastern governments yielding to pressures from American a Europe if they wanted NATO and EU status. Thus Poland has been among the most receptive to Holocaust education, while UkraineBelarus have been much slower.

REG: Some of your own personal experiences negotiating and monitoring Holocaust commemoration projects?

Sam Gruber: After the problem of funding, the hardest part of getting monuments and memorials erected not been getting some kind of general consent, it has been working the specifics of design and especially of language. Most older memorials have been very general in their language – so much so that it is often hard to even figure out what events are being commemorated, and rarely can one learn about who did what to whom, and when. This began to change in the 1990s.

In my experience with the US Commission [for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad], it has always been part of the mission that monuments should be not only be symbolic, but that they must help tell a story. Hey need to be witness – clear voices in languages that local people can understand – and they must be as forthright and truthful as possible. Sometimes one could do this in Hebrew, Yiddish or English…local officials didn’t mind. But increasing there has been a push to get truth told in local languages, and that has meant sharp clashes with local Holocaust deniers, or with those who want to protect local reputations. These conflicts have slowed many monument projects…but ultimately they are very good…because it makes the education and commemoration process an active and forceful one, not just a passive act.

In Latvia, at Rumbula, it took the personal intercession of the President of Latvia to make sure language was included on the inscription that mentioned Latvian collaborators. Another problem is using numbers – as in 10,000 Jews were killed. Frequently initial drafts of monument texts are changed to avoid that level of specificity. It is feared that if a number is contested and even disproved, even just by a bit, that such misrepresentation could be used to discredit the entire project, and by extension to paint an entire massacre, or even the entire Holocaust, as false.

The installation of local monuments is often the most touching, since many non-Jews are eager to participate. The older people remember – and one can never by sure what exactly it is that they remember. The younger people are often eager to learn. Usually, the slower the project, and the more it is the result of a continuing dialogue and planning process that is inclusive of local people, the more successful the result, because local people have a proprietary stake in the project. Monuments that are erected without local involvement, but only through the time and money of “outsiders” – even if they are descendants of those murdered in the town – can be more controversial.

REG: How important is this all, 65 years after the fact?

Sam Gruber: Understanding the history of the Holocaust, including acts of complicity and acts of resistance; remains extremely important in this part of the world. Of course, it is important to Jews who want recognition of Jewish suffering, and acknowledgment of the extent of the destruction of an entire civilization. But it is equally important for the individuals and governments of those countries themselves since only by wrestling with their often contentious and convoluted histories can they reduce the likelihood of a future similar to the past. These are still fledgling democracies. Some have a vague memory of pre-Communist democratic institutions and objective historical research. Most, however, have been shaped by rigid ideology for most of a century. Thus it is one thing for Czechs - so close to Austria and Germany, to be attuned to political and historical revisionism of reconsiderations of the recent decades, but it is very different in Ukraine, which was never really independent, and has been under Tsarist and Communist rule since the 19th century. And those areas of - like Lviv - which were more international and multi-cultural before the Holocaust, are today incredibly homogeneous, with populations mostly drawn from the Ukrainian countryside, resettled in Lviv after World War II. For the most part they are not aware of any objective history, including their own. In Ukraine, Holocaust education must be part of a larger package of education about European history overall.

People sometimes suggest that I write a book about Holocaust memory and monuments - mixing the political and the practical; aesthetics and altruism. It has been a nearly a generation since James Young published his important book Texture of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). That book was a primer for me, but James and I come to the subject from very different perspectives - in this case he as a critic and academic, while I am an activist and work with closely with Jewish communities. At the moment though I may have the focus to write such a book, I don't have the (almost greater) energy needed to seek out a publisher. But if any of my readers want to pursue this...by all means, let me know.

Poland: Monuments and Memory in Warsaw

Umschlagplatz Monument (top) and Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Monument (bottom)
Photos: Samuel D. Gruber 2008

Poland: Monuments and Memory in Warsaw
by Samuel D. Gruber

(ISJM) In my recent blogpost about President Obama’s visit to Buchenwald, I mentioned in comparison to Buchenwald's Little Camp (Kleine Lager)monument the older – and I think still exemplary – monument erected by the City of Warsaw at the place known as the Umschlagplatz (Ul. Stawki close to the intersection of ul. Dzika), the assembly and transfer point where Jews were herded from the Warsaw Ghetto and from whence they were placed on the trains that took them to their deaths at Treblinka.

I first saw the monument in 1990, shortly after it was constructed, and was struck then by the clarity of its design and the directness with which it spoke to the visitor. Unlike most Holocaust monuments I had seen up until that time, it was entirely devoid of the claptrap, bombast, false sentimentality and empty rhetoric common to memorials of all sorts. The Monument especially stood in start contrast to the granite and bronze Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Monument designed by L.M. Suzin and sculpted by Nathan Rapaport, which stands not far away and which, since its dedication in 1948, has been the iconic image of post-Holocaust Jewish Warsaw.

The dynamic tension between these monuments, which are now connected by the very subtle “Remembrance Walk,” is going to be changed with the construction of the new Museum of the History of Polish Jews, to be built immediately opposite Rapoport’s monument, and where construction begins this summer (see my previous post). No doubt the new museum will re-focus some interest on the history of the Ghetto period, but it is also likely to steal the thunder (whatever thunder is left) from the earlier memorials.

I had the opportunity to revisit both monuments last fall, after the Umschlagplatz monument was fully cleaned and restored by the City of Warsaw, which owns and is responsible for the site.


The monument is even smaller than I remembered it. Every time I visit I recall how delicate a structure it is, which surprises me given its continued power to arouse in me a powerful response – a reaction that is essentially rational, but that teeters on the edge of a deep well of grief. Of course the quiet of the monument is in contrast to what must have been the loud, tense, dangerous and tragic situation on this spot in 1943 (reenacted in the film The Pianist).

Like the monument at Treblinka, the destination point of Jews from the Umschlagplatz (and to my mind, one of the greatest memorials ever made), the monument is essentially abstract, and through the use of a few simple forms, materials and distilled inscriptions to uses abstraction to allow the mind and heart to meld in deep contemplation.

This is very different from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Monument, which is a more in-your-face presentation of a heroic struggle and tragic lose. As James Young has carefully documented (Texture of Memory, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995, Chapter 5, “The Biography of a Memorial Icon: Nathan Rapoport’s Warsaw Ghetto Monument,” 155-184), the monument to the Ghetto Uprising was designed by Nathan Rapoport and unveiled in 1948. The sufferings and deaths of hundreds of thousands on and near this site are diminished, and even neglected in the selective memory that underlies Rapaport’s celebration of the Ghetto fighters.

The distinction between the two monuments is due in large part to the times in which they were built. The area of the ghetto, though a place of acute grief to many, was even more a site of shame – for those who perpetuated the cruelty of the place, but also for those who witnessed it, and for those who failed to act to prevent it. Thus only those aspects of the Warsaw Ghetto site that were deemed heroic were, until recently, officially remembered.

Though grand when first unveiled atop the rubble of the Ghetto, the Rapoport monument seems smaller now. It still commands the plaza on which it sits, but the plaza now has the intimacy of a familiar room. When I was last there a few old people were sitting on benches near the shrubbery, and a few children were playing. While the monument was originally pitched to a stadium-sized audience, now it is quieter, more like chamber music, but richer and subtler than it was before. Sixty-five years has not dimmed its message, but it has broadened it. While the children played, one man came and placed flowers at the monument base.

We now want much more from the monument, and I wish that for a generation or so it could be turned around so that the little-viewed (and rarely-reproduced) low relief on the back of the monument that shows the Jewish victims processing (to their deaths) could a greater focus of memory. Viewing that moving relief – that recalls the procession of Roman soldiers carrying the spoils of the Temple on the Arch of Titus in Rome, and thus a history of Jewish tragedy – is the first step toward transition to the Umschlagplatz.

Ghetto Uprising Monument (top), Arch of Titus, Rome (bottom)
Photos: Samuel D. Gruber

That relief is also rooted in the Jewish social art of the turn of the 20th century - works like Maurycy Minkowski'sJews Leaving the Town (ca 1910) and Jacob Weinles' Jews Fleeing a Pogrom (ca. 1914); both works lost or destoryed in the Holocaust; and Samuel Hirszenberg's Exile (1904)and The Black Banner (1905). Dr. Eleanora Bergman, Director of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw tells me that she, at least, always begins her tours of the Ghetto from the rear side of the monument.

Maurycy Minkowski, Jews Leaving the Town (ca 1910)

It is well known that Post-war selective rebuilding in Warsaw led to highly selective memory, not just of the Holocaust, but also of the entire pre-War and Jewish history of the city. It took a half-century for some of the elements of the earlier topography to reemerge - in the form of the unobtrusive Remembrance Walk, consisting of nineteen stone blocks sited on a route from the Ghetto Uprising Monument, culminating at the Umschlagplatz. The route and monument were designed by Hanna Szmalenberg and Wladyslaw Klamerus and dedicated in 1988 on the 45th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The simple blocks are dedicated to notable figures that died in the Ghetto and who are surrogates for thousands of unnamed others (but since the texts are only in Polish they are there for the local audience, not tourists - unlike the new series of monuments erected to remember the Ghetto wall, which are in Polish and English).

The subtle but still more visible Umshlagplatz monument, however, combines literal and symbolic elements in a formal memorial language. The enclosed space next to the former Jewish hospital provides a refuge for contemplation, but the enclosure also conveys the feeling of separation. The black band in the white wall recalls the tallit, Jewish shawl in which a man prayers, and in which a pious Jews is buried. Over the entrance is a matzevah (tombstone)- shaped lintel showing a broken tree, within a forest of broken trees symbolizing untimely death of an individual and of a community.

Inside, glimpsed through a cut in the wall, one sees a living tree, symbol of hope, renewal, revival. Is it the Tree of Knowledge? Or the Etz Hayyim, the Tree of Life? In a place like Warsaw, were the two the same? If people had known, would they have died? Or did they know, but did not act?

The artists chose four hundred first names, typical of Warsaw Ghetto Jews and engraved on the walls - to allow the viewer a glimpse of the individuality of the dead, and to associate with them. It’s as if we went to a Warsaw city directory of the period and picked out people, who became names, and then numbers, and then victims. Anyone and everyone is included. Whenever I visit I see my own name – Samuel – and know that I would have been a victim, too.


Inside the striped walls of the memorial, with its benches around the perimeter like an old prayer hall, one can almost hear an old Jew – or all the Ghetto Jews – chanting El Maleh Rachamim (the memorial prayer).

Four plaques in Polish, Hebrew, Yiddish and English explain, “Along this path of suffering a death over 300,000 Jews were driven in 1942-43 from the Warsaw Ghetto to the gas chambers of the Nazi extermination camps.” Like the monument itself, the text is simple, direct and true.

Estonia: More Concentration Camp Commemorative Markers to Be Dedicated July 7, 2009

Estonia: More Concentration Camp Commemorative Markers to Be Dedicated July 7, 2009

by Samuel D. Gruber

(ISJM) On a recent blogpost I mentioned the on-going project in Estonia to mark the sites of Holocaust-era concentration camps in Estonia, established by the Nazis in large part to develop the oil shale industry in the region. Jews from Germany, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania and elsewhere were imprisoned and enslaved to labor at the camps. Many died because of brutal conditions; others were executed toward the end of the war as the Germans withdrew from Estonia. While these were not Estonian-created camps, it is true that many Estonians worked in the camps as guards and in other capacities.

The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Estonia and the Jewish Community of Estonia have announced the completion of the second phase of a project to better mark the sites of former Concentration Camps in Estonia, to take place on July 7th, at the former site of Kohtla-Nõmme labor camp. This is one of three markers set up this year as part of the co-operative project “Holocaust markers in Estonia”. The others will be at sites at Asari and Soski.

In 2005, new or additional markers were installed at five sites - Ereda, Kiviõli, Klooga, Illuka, Metsakmistu and Vaivara.

This project was developed over a series of years through the initiative and perseverance of Cilja Laud, former president of the Jewish Community of Estonia and Anton Pärn, Undersecretary, Ministry of Culture of Estonia with continuing support and funding from the United States Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad, and especially the involvement of Commission Chairman Warren L. Miller and Commission members Lee Seeman and Gary Lavine. The Commission helped shape the project, negotiate involvement from the Ministry of Culture of Estonia and to raise the funds needed from private donors and foundations.

Having worked on this project for several years in its earliest phases, I am delighted that it has reached this point. I still maintain the hope that this is just the beginning of an even more substantial project in Estonia of Holocaust education. Information about the markers, the sites and what happened at these camps must be widely disseminated. I am encouraged by the remarks of Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip at Klooga May 8, 2005 when he said: "Here in Klooga, we are in a place, which symbolizes the evil and inhumanity of the Nazi ideology...Last Thursday, the Government of the Republic of Estonia released an official statement, in which it regrets the fact that in cooperation with occupying powers, citizens of the Republic of Estonia also participated in the perpetration of crimes against humanity. Although these murderers must answer for their crimes as individuals, the Estonian Government continues to do everything possible to expose these crimes. I apologize for the fact that Estonian citizens could be found among those who participated in the murdering of people or assisted in the perpetration of these crimes.”

Then-Estonian president Arnold Rüütel was even more explicit in his statement at the dedication of the new Klooga marker in July 24, 2005, when he said “Being the President of the Republic of Estonia I feel hurt that among the citizens of our state there were those who participated in Nazi crimes. It does not matter whatever motives they had for such behavior. We condemn the deeds of those people and we apologize for them..”

Brief History of the Concentration Camps in Estonia

(the following account is adapted from project documents prepared by the US Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad with help from the Jewish Community of Estonia and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and especially historian Nicholas Lane)

There were 22 concentration and labor camps established by the Germans in Estonia during the Second World War. Over 10,000 Jews are believed to have died at these camps. Until now, their enslavement, suffering, and death has hardly been recognized, and never been appropriately commemorated. This project will create a system of memorials throughout Estonia indicating the location of each camp and associated mass graves. The Jewish Community of Estonia is also preparing educational materials as part of this project.

The camps in Estonia were generally set up in forests and marshy regions, in order to prevent contact between the prisoners and the people of the neighborhood.

Many of the camps were labor camps where inmates were brutally worked in an effort to extract oil from shale deposits. The largest number of sites --15-- was in Ida -Virumaa County. Most of the prisoners were housed in wooden huts, often with extremely thin walls made of canvas. It is related how on very cold days the prisoners' hair would freeze to the canvas walls. The camp that was most notorious for its bad conditions was Lower Ereda, which was called by the prisoners "A Grave for the Living". Generally, all the clothing the prisoners had brought with them was confiscated upon arrival. Shoes were made of wood and were a torture to the prisoners.

The camp prisoners were mainly employed in the service of the German authorities and the Wehrmacht. In 1942, when the prisoners were brought to Jagala, their principal task had been to sort out the clothing of the dead; but in 1943, when the Soviet offensive and the German counter-offensive were expected, the prisoners’ main tasks were to work in the Slanietz mines for production of synthetic fuel, and to work for the army doing jobs including road-building, laying railway tracks, digging anti-tank trenches, building bunkers and other military installations from concrete. Labor for the Slanietz mines was drawn especially from the Ereda, Vivikoni, Kivioli and Kunda camps. In the Klooga camp, three shifts worked without a break, mainly on various concrete products.

As the war wound down and the Russians approached from the east, the Germans began to evacuate and execute the thousands of prisoners in the Estonian camps. The mass killing of camp inmates was carried out at the Lagedi camp on September 18, 1944 and in the Klooga camp the following day, as the German armies retreated in confusion. In Lagedi, 426 people were killed and in Klooga about 2,400 Jewish prisoners and some Soviet prisoners-of-war were executed. They were all shot in the back of the neck, and then gasoline was poured on the piles of corpses and set alight. In Klooga, tens of persons were shot as they fled from the scene of the massacre, but a few survived. A few also survived the massacre at Lagedi. During the killing in the forest near Klooga, about 85 people managed to escape from the assembly point to hide in various places, mainly in an attic in one of the huts. After the liberation about 100 escapees from other camps gathered at Klooga, and a few months later they moved on to Vilnius.

These sites and other Holocaust-related sites in Estonia have, for the most part, been neglected for the past sixty years. Five locations were marked as sites of martyrdom during the Soviet period with memorials that were not specific and were even inaccurate in their inscriptions. At least two sites more have received new memorial markers since Estonia achieved independence in 1991. In 1994, the Jewish Community, with the cooperation of the government of Estonia erected a memorial at Klooga using funds received from Germany for survivors of Estonian concentration camps. Also in 1994, private individuals erected a small monument at Vaivara. In 2002, the Jewish Community erected a stone and tablet at Aleve–Liiva with financial assistance from the Polish, Czech, and Germany governments, because citizens of these countries were killed there. Today, only these three camps are at all adequately marked with memorials for those who suffered, and with accurate information for those who visit the sites today. Even these sites require additional on-site information, and in the case of Klooga, restoration of the Soviet-era memorial enclosure at the mass grave.

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.

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.

Poland: New Monuments erected in Gdansk on Anniversary of Kinderstransport

Poland: New Monuments Erected in Gdansk on Anniversary of Kinderstransport

(ISJM) Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland reports that on May 6-7, 2009, the 70th anniversary of the Kinderstransport (evacuation of Jewish children from Germany, Austria, the Free City of Danzig (Gdansk), Czechoslovakia, Latvia, Estonia and Poland to England between 1938-1939) took place in Gdansk. The Kinderstransport saved the lives of about 11 thousand Jewish children just in the months before hte outbreak of the Second World War and the onslaught of the Holocaust. About 130 children came from Gdansk (formerly Danzig) in four transports.

A monument to the Kindertransports was unveiled in Gdansk as well as new matzevot (gravestones) in the cemetery marking the graves of Rabbis Elchanan Ashkenasi and Meir Posner.

Poland: More on Former Warsaw Ghetto Boundary Markers

Poland: More on Former Warsaw Ghetto Boundary Markers

I wrote ten days ago about a new series of monuments marking the perimeter of the former Warsaw Ghetto. The monuments were officially inaugurated in a ceremony last week held at the Jewish Historical Institute.

Vanessa Gera of Associated Press filed the following report:

Warsaw marks borders of former ghetto By VANESSA GERA

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Polish officials marked the border of the former Warsaw Ghetto on Wednesday with plaques and boundary lines traced in the ground to preserve the memory of the tragic World War II-era Jewish quarter.

The markers were inaugurated with speeches by the Warsaw mayor and other officials. A group that included Holocaust survivors and members of the Jewish community then made their way in the rain together to reflect on the past at some of the 21 memorial plaques.

The head of Poland's Jewish community, Piotr Kadlcik, called the project "very important" and "the fulfillment of a dream."

"For many years it was deliberate — no one really remembered that there used to be another city here, there used to be another reality," Kadlcik said.

The read the full story click here

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.

Europe: September 7th set for European Day of Jewish Culture

Visitors to Jewish sites in Florence, Italy on European Day of Jewish Culture, 2003
photos: Samuel D. Gruber

Europe: September 7th set for European Day of Jewish Culture

(ISJM) This year’s European Day of Jewish Culture has been set for September 7, 2008. The day is a celebration of Jewish heritage sites and culture across Europe and is now observed in 30 countries. Developed following a program in Alsace that arranged for dozens of usually inaccessible synagogues, former synagogues and cemeteries to be open to the public, the Day of Jewish Culture now includes almost every conceivable type of cultural event including lectures, concerts, tours, and seminars. But access to Jewish sties for a wide (and mostly local public) and instruction about them remains at the heart of the celebration.

This year, the theme is “Testimonies”, chosen to highlight the cultural “imprint” left by the Jews wherever they have lived in Europe. Thus, the Cultural Day unites those places which retain active Jewish communities and those Jewish spaces without Jews.

Participating countries include Austria, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine and United Kingdom. In past years throughout Europe as many as 1,000 volunteers joined to organize and coordinate events.

The official program for the day is posted as it is developed, at www.jewisheritage.org

Each country arranges its day differently. For some, it is the only time that certain places are open. Elsewhere, the Day is used to draw attention to otherwise little-known sites that are now accessible year-round.

Since 2004, the event has being co-organized by B’nai B’rith Europe, the European Council of Jewish Communities and Red de Juderías de España. For more information: www.jewisheritage.org; details of the events online from June 2007 onwards.