Stones and Stone-carver images from a century ago

Here's a cross-post from candlesticksonstone

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

The wonderful imagery on East European tombstones was created by talented and extraordinarily creative stone-carvers who are now, for the most part, anonymous. Everyone so often, a photograph of a more recent traditional stone-carver turns up. Sergey Kravstov has sent me the image below.

The illustration is from the catalogue: The Jewish Art of Solomon Yudovin (1892-1954). From Folk Art to Socialist Realism, by Ruth Apter-Gabriel (Jerusalem, 1991). Yudevin was a wonderful artist born near Vitebsk, the same town where Marc Chagall was born.

The drypoint at right, dated 1939, is clearly based on the photo at left, taken in Ostroh/Ostrog in Volhynia — probably during the expedition into Ukraine led by the Yiddish writer An-Sky in 1912-14 to document the rapidly disappearing Jewish cultural life of the shtetl. This would mean that it was taken by Yudovin, who was a photographer on that expedition. It’s a very dramatic shot and to me looks staged!

I have tried to figure out what the design he is carving is — but I can’t make it out….

Here below is a wood cut by Yudevin that shows a funeral at a shtetl’s Jewish cemetery — including the gravestone of a woman that bears the typical candlestick motif.

Poland -- Jewish life in Krakow article

Jonathan Ornstein and Staszek Krajewski at a discussion on Jewish identity in Poland at the Krakow JCC in 2010. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber). 

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

The Jerusalem Post ran a long article about Jewish life and experience in Krakow, focusing on the role and work of the new Jewish Community Center, which opened in 2008. The author, Israel Kasnett, asks the usual questions, and writes about many of the usual scenes, paradoxes and tropes. I'm glad though to see a generally positive spin in his description of what I have called the "new authenticities" in the city.

For many people, Jewish life cannot conceivably flourish in Krakow – a city so close in proximity to the Auschwitz and Plaszow concentration camps where more than a million people were murdered. To them, Krakow has simply become a stopover on the way to the camps, to see where Schindler’s List was filmed or to visit the graves of ancestors.

But 66 years after the war, and 22 years since the fall of communism, the question remains: Can Krakow’s Jewish community flourish once again? My recent visit to its Beit Chayil Jewish Community Center proved that today there exists more than just death and a Jewish past.

 Read full article HERE