UK: Liverpool's Deane Road Jewish Cemetery Restoration and Conference

Liverpool, UK. Deane Rd. Jewish Cemetery. View during restoration from a large tree that was subsequently removed during the restoration.   Photo: Tom Fowles, courtesy of Liverpool Old Hebrew Congregation

UK: Liverpool's Deane Road Jewish Cemetery Restoration and Conference

The Deane Road Jewish Cemetery in Liverpool, site of one of Europe's most ambitious recent  Jewish cemetery restoration projects, will be the subject - along with other local cultural heritage efforts - of a one-day conference on heritage restoration on February 27, 2013.  The cemetery's  first burials were in 1837 and continued until 1904.  It was abandoned and overgrown for much of the past century.

Restoration of the site is substantially complete this year, though a rigorous schedule of maintenance and repair needs to be maintained.  The cemetery is still owned by the Liverpool Old Hebrew Congregation (LOHC), housed in the historic Princes Road Synagogue, one of the grandest Victorian synagogues surviving in the UK and the only Grade I listed synagogue outside of London.  The synagogue has been object of a continuing restoration project since the 1990s and has received several recent grants (2008, 2010) from the Heritage Lottery Fund for roof repair.

The cemetery project is developed with help  by an active group of  volunteers from the congregation and the larger community.  The volunteers maintain an impressive website about the cemetery and those buried there. The cleaning of the cemetery revealed many unknown gravestones and the volunteers have been researching and writing biographies of those buried in the cemetery.

There have been many attempts since the 1970s to clean and restore the 19th-century cemetery, but these have all failed.  A new effort begun in 2003 received nearly £500,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund in 2010 and this has allowed a full scale restoration to proceed, from the impressive Greek Revival gateway to finally addressing the problem of invasive and destructive vegetation.  The size and scope of the project recalls that undertaken for the old Jewish cemetery in Florence, Italy more than decade ago.

The Liverpool: Conference on Heritage Restoration (Feb. 27, 2013) will conclude with a tour of the cemetery and celebrate its new condition.  Lessons from the project and other local preservation efforts will be discussed at the conference.

London's Ben Uri Museum to Add George Grosz's The Lecture (also known as Anti - Semite) to Its Growing Collection

 George Grosz, The Lecture (also known as Anti - Semite). Photo courtesy of Ben Uri Collection

London's Ben Uri Museum to Add George Grosz's The Lecture (also known as Anti - Semite) to Its Growing Collection 
by Samuel D. Gruber

(ISJM) The Board of Trustees of the Ben Uri Museum in London has announced the acquisition of George Grosz's (1893-1959) ink and watercolor satiric sketch The Lecture (also known as Anti - Semite), an important work that depicts the radical Jewish writer Erich Mühsam, a friend of Grocz's who was murdered in the Oranienburg concentration camp in 1934. Mühsam is shown as one of two heads on a poster a which a Nazi lecturer gesticulates.  

The work has been donated to the Museum by Sally, Richard and Andrew Kalman from their family collection in honor of their late father Andras Kalman (1919 - 2007).  Kalman  came to study in England in 1939. When war broke out, he was cut off from his parents and brothers in Hungary, who late perished in the Holocaust.

The Museum acquired Grosz’s Nazi Interrogation, from the same period, in 2010.  Grosz was one of the most prominent artists of the Weimar period.  In Berlin, Grosz was a fierce critic of war and capitalism, and one of the most biting artistic opponents of the Nazis before their seizing power, and after he left Germany for America in 1932.  Grosz was among the first Germans to be stripped of his citizenship by the Nazi regime.  

Today, Grosz's son, who lives in Philadelphia, is still trying to regain some of the many Grosz paintings confiscated after his father left Germany.  Many of these were sold by the Nazi's or surfaced after the war are are now in major museum collections.  You can read more here and from the New York Times here.

 

 George Grosz, The Interrogation. Photo courtesy of Ben Uri Collection

Ben Uri will  mark the acquisition of the new Grosz work by launching its 'Holocaust Education Through the Ben Uri Collection' website, a learning resource for teachers and GCSE students created in partnership with the London Grid for Learning.  For a preview of the website please go to:  www.benuriholocaust.lgfl.net 

The Ben Uri was founded in London's Jewish East End nearly a century ago, in 1915 (read history here), as ‘The Jewish National Decorative Art Association (London), “Ben Ouri”. The museum, in its present orgniazaiton, was founded in 2001 and recent years under the leadership of David Glasser has been greatly expanding its collection of works by artists of Jewish origin, and has mounted many important exhibits.  In 2010 the museum acquired an important Chagall crucifixion, which then led to the mounting of an ambitious exhibition of modern crucifixions - many by Jewish artist.  The collection is limited, however, by its small current space and continues to plan for a new and permanent home somewhere in Central London.  Perhaps we will see that happen - or at least announced - in time for the centennial.

For now, you can see around 400 selected works from the Ben Uri Collection (of over 1300) in the Museum's online gallery.

Italy: Plans for Rome's Holocaust Museum Move Forward

 

 Rome, Italy. Top: Project design for the the new Holocaust Museum at the Villa Torlonia (photo courtesy Museo Nazionale della Shoah). Below: Detail of the Jewish catacomb wall painting in situ beneath the Villa Torlonia (photo courtesy World Monuments Fund).

Italy: Plans for Rome's Holocaust Museum Move Forward - but Lentemente
by Samuel D. Gruber

(ISJM) Ruth Ellen Gruber reports from Rome that plans for a Holocaust Museum at the Villa Torlonia move forward - but lentemente (slowly)  Now, with the new museum Rome follows other towns and cities in Europe such as Mechelen, Belgium which opened its new Museum and documentation Center in December, and Drancy, France, which opened a new facility last September.   More and more these Holocaust museums and centers are taking the form of high-design mausolea/boxes - in black, white or gray.  These buildings strive for simplicity and dignity, and mostly fall back on simple modernism and minimalism for their architectural/sculptural form.  In the case of the Rome Museum, the inscribed names of victims will  symbolically enliven - or at least enlighten - the exterior.  This will be the first Holocaust Museum in Italy, though there are many Jewish museums (Rome, Florence, Bologna)  and memorial sites (especially that of Carpi, but also in Rome) that reference and commemorate the deportation of Italian Jews.

Carpi, Italy. Detail of the memorial to deported Jews.  Photo: Samuel D. Gruber (2006)

 Rome, Italy. Largo 16 Ottobre 1943. Commemorative Plaques.  Photo: Samuel D. Gruber (2004)

The design for the museum is by architects Luca Zevi and Giorgio Tamburini.  Zevi is son of architect and critic Bruno Zevi (who compiled a masterful work on the architecture of Erich Mendelsohn, whose design for the hoped-for first-ever Holocaust memorial in Riverside Park, New York, was never built).  Luca's mother Tullia Zevi was the head of the Italian Jewish community in the 1980s and 90s, when control of the Jewish catacombs was wrested from the Catholic Church and shared by the Jewish Community of Rome and the Rome archaeological superintendency.   Historian Gav Rosenfeld (author of Building After Auschwitz: Jewish Architecture and the Memory of the Holocaust interviewed Luca Zevi about the project the The Daily Forward in 2011.

In the early 1990s I worked with Tullia and Prof. Giorgio Torraca on studies of the Jewish catacomb underneath the villa to ascertain what - if any - level of public visitation the fragile site could bear.  The catacomb is the site of some of the most precious Late Antique (probably 4th century) Jewish painting and inscriptions.  Significantly, many of these are about memory, and suggest some sense of an eternal life, the very themes to be enshrined in the new memorial/museum for the thousands of Italian Jews killed in the Holocaust.

Bureaucracy stalls construction of Italy’s first Holocaust museum

By Ruth Ellen Gruber · January 22, 2013

ROME (JTA) -- If all goes according to plan, a starkly modern, $30 million Holocaust museum will soon rise on the site of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini’s Rome residence.
The site, also the location of ancient Jewish catacombs and now a city park, will be home to a museum first proposed in 2005 but held up repeatedly by financial and bureaucratic problems.

“I hope construction begins this summer,” Leone Paserman, the president of the Museum of the Shoah Foundation, told JTA. “Of course in Italy, it is always hard to say.”

The facility will be the first Holocaust museum in Italy, which despite its wartime alliance with Nazi Germany has a somewhat mixed Holocaust record. The country adopted fiercely anti-Semitic legislation in 1938, barring Jews from schools, dismissing them from public positions and outlawing intermarriage, among other restrictions.

At the same time, the Italian military generally declined to take part in the murder or deportation of the country’s Jews, and territories occupied by Italian forces were considered relatively safe. The first deportations to death camps came only after Nazi Germany occupied parts of Italy in 1943 following the surrender of the fascist government to allied forces.

Read the full story in JTA

Greece: Ioannina Jewish Cemetery Designated Protected Historic Site

Ioannina, Greece. Views of Jewish cemetery. Photos: Marcia Haddad Ikonomopoulos

Greece: Ioannina Jewish Cemetery Designated Protected Historic Site
by Samuel D. Gruber 

(n.b. this article contains information provided by Marcia Haddad Ikonomopoulos, President, Association of Friends of Greek Jewry  and the late Vincent Giordano)

(ISJM) Last summer, Congregation Kehila Kedosha Janina (KKJ) in New York announced that the Jewish Cemetery in Ioannina, Greece, the ancestral home of the Lower East Side congregation, has been designated an historical landmark.  KKJ submitted photographs of gravestones of the cemetery identified as dating from the early 15th century to the Jewish Community of Ioannina, which then submitted them to the Municipality of Ioannina (see the website kkjsm.org for photos) and these helped secure the designation by the municipality. The oldest gravestone discovered thus far is that of Rabbi Aaron Matathia Halevi and is dated 1426.  A second gravestone of similar style is for Matathia Joseph Halevi.  In 2009, when I wrote about this cemetery, and reported the prediction that such gravestones (and maybe even older ones) would be discovered.
 

Click here to see photos and transcriptions of the oldest stones found in Ioannina

 

On behalf of the Jewish Community of Ioannina and its president, Moses Eliasof, KKJ now plans to move ahead with a fund raising effort to enable a cleanup and restoration of the cemetery.

Tradition has it that gravestones were moved from Ioannina's oldest cemeteries, which no longer survive, to the present cemetery which was founded in the early 19th century on land purchased from Ali Pasha.  

The Zosimaia School now stands on this site of a former Jewish cemetery, but it is not known from when it dates.  At some point after 1892, another cemetery was opened by the community in the Kalkan area of the city.  In 1922, a portion of this property was used to build homes and at that time, the community began to use a field known as Gem for their new cemetery; today's  Bet Chaim Jewish Cemetery.   It is not known if bodies were exhumed and moved, but gravestones of rabbis were moved and some of these are the ones recently discovered.

Over the gate to the cemetery is the Hebrew inscription:

"The Almighty Who dwells among us has allowed us to erect a wall around this field so they (the deceased) may repose in the land of the living; for the consecration of the Society of the Righteous (Hevra Hesed) and with the notables of the day."

During the junta of 1967-1974, the military wanted to take the unused property over. The Jewish community protested; since the deed no longer existed, a legal battle followed and the community prevailed. As part of the legal decision, it was stated that should the Ioannina Jewish community cease to exist, the field would be turned over to the Central Board of Jewish Communities in Athens.

In 1999 the local Jewish Community transferred an area of 6,000 sq. m. of the cemetery to the Municipality of Ioannina.  The Municipality (claiming the change of the city plan) then trespassed on a large part of the cemetery, and tried to expropriate the area.  The Central Board of the Jewish Communities of Greece, with the cooperation of the local Jewish Community, strongly reacted, setting in play a series of events that has led to better documentation and appreciation of the site. The community in New York has acted as a strong lobbying force for the community in Ioannina, making its presence known annually and assuring that the municipality knows that the remaining Jewish Community of 32 does not stand alone.  
 

The cemetery was been vandalized several times, most recently in 2009. The construction of a protective wall around the cemetery in 2009 is designed to protect the cemetery and clearly demarcate its boundaries.  

The Jewish sites and community of Ioannina  have long been of special interest to the international Survey of Jewish Monuments, which sponsored the documentary work of the late Vincent Giordano.  Despite Vincent's death, ISJM still plans to proceed with completion of his Before the Flame Goes Out project.