New Book on Jewish Heritage Published -- "Reclaiming Memory"

Tempel Synagogue, Krakow. July 2009. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

I'm delighted to announced the publication of a new book, to which I have contributed. It's called Reclaiming Memory: Urban regeneration in the historic Jewish quarters of Central European Cities, and it is published by the International Cultural Center in Krakow, Poland.

Edited by Monika Murzyn-Kupisz and Jacek Purchla, the book is the English language version of a collection of essays that was already published last year in Poland.

The essays included form the proceedings of a conference held in June 2007.

I've contributed a piece in my "beyond Virtually Jewish" mode, dealing with the creation of "new authenticities" and "real imaginary spaces" in today's world. It is a delight to be in a collection whose other contributors include Miriam Akavia, Leopold Unger, Janusz Makuch, Magdalena Waligorska, Martha Keil, Arno Parik, Jarolsav Klenovsky, Lena Bergman, Adam Bartosz and others.

Reclaiming memory – the theme of the conference organised by the International Cultural Centre in Krakow in June 2007 – is one of the most significant issues in Central Europe since the fall of communism. One salient aspect of this issue is Jewish heritage, for so many centuries such an expressive facet of the identity of this part of the continent, yet now survived only by a hollow echo. Vibrant districts were reduced by the Holocaust to lifeless spaces – witnesses to tragedy, orphaned monuments to a culture sentenced to annihilation, and in the best case to oblivion.

With the fall of communism and the restitution of freedom to Central Europe, the time came to reclaim that memory. The rediscovery of Jewish culture has become a characteristic feature of the transformation of the region’s largest metropolises: Berlin, Budapest, Prague, Vilnius and Warsaw.

The papers brought together in this publication go further than a simple general analysis of the issues attendant upon attempts at regeneration of former centres of Jewish culture since 1989. Their authors have tried to take a wider angle on the subject of Jewish heritage, and in particular on what Ruth E. Gruber aptly dubs its “new authenticity” and the phenomenon of “real imagined space”. For the question arises whether, paradoxically, this rapid evolution from a phase of destruction to rampant commercialisation will not eradicate completely the testimony to the Jewish presence in our culture that even the Holocaust failed to destroy?

The other

Jewish Tombstones as Building Material -- This Time in the U.S...

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

The photographer Ahron D. Weiner has discovered Jewish tombstones used to build an embankment for the Woodmere Club's golf course on Long Island.

In Tablet Magazine, where a slide show of his photographs is posted, Weiner said:

the club insists the stones—none of which seem to contain dates, only names and symbols—were extra granite, donated many years ago by long-dead club members.

If that is the case -- fine and good!

Still, I've documented and written about Jewish cemeteries and tombstones in eastern Europe for 20 years by now, and always one of the most disturbing sights is to find gravestones used as building material.

There are many examples -- back in November, I posted here about a planned exhibition on this topic.

Sometimes this type of misuse was done out of deliberate desecration -- as when the Nazis demolished cemeteries and used the tombstones to pave roads or line ditches and river beds, or as foundations for buildings...I vividly recall a farmer in the village of Krynki, in eastern Poland, prying away stones to show us how they were used as the foundation of what he said had been a pig sty....

Other times, however, Jews seem to have used the stones themselves.... there is a long retaining wall at the historic Jewish cemetery in Mikulov, Czech Republic, for example, that is composed of tombstones.

Mikulov. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Mikulov. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

In the past 25-30 years, it has become commonplace to use broken tombstones as a sort of mosaic memorial wall, to commemorate Holocaust victims.

There are many examples of this -- the most famous, perhaps, is in the Old Jewish Cemetery in Krakow and the large Holocaust memorial at the site of one of the Jewish cemeteries in Kazimierz Dolny, Poland.

Earlier this month, I photographed such a wall at the New Jewish Cemetery in Krakow:

Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber