This post originally appeared on my En Route blog for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Hmm. I spent much of the morning in Warsaw today talking with an E-Book and App publisher about creating apps and interactive E-Books from my own writing,  on various platforms. So I am quite convinced that going mobile is the way to get around. Still, I’m somehow a little teentsy weentsy bit uneasy with “Anne Frank’s Amsterdam” —even though it clearly is a very serious project aimed to instruct visitors while showing the city. It is available on various smart phone platforms, and created by Anne Frank House. Maybe it’s just the promotional aspect of the project….From the Anne Frank House website:

discover for yourself Anne Frank’s and her contemporaries’ stories at thirty special places in the city with the Anne’s Amsterdam mobile application. The Anne Frank House has developed this App together with Repudo and LBi with the aim of making the city’s wartime history better known. Anne’s Amsterdam is available in Dutch, English and German and suitable for smart phones with iOS, Android and WP7.

With Anne’s Amsterdam you can view personal stories, film footage and unique photographs from the past at the same location today. There are images of Anne Frank and her friends on the Merwedeplein, German troops entering the city on the Rokin and the raid on the Jonas Daniël Meijerplein. This link between the past and the present enables you see the city in a different way by which events of the war come to life. You can collect the stories, films and photos for your digital album on your telephone. You can also send your items per e-mail and encourage others to use the App via Facebook and Twitter.

The items collected link to the website Anne Frank’s Amsterdam. A visual timeline gives in depth information and context. Personal stories, not previously published on the internet, from Jewish and non-Jewish eyewitnesses give a view of life during the occupation. The period before and after the occupation are also discussed, placing Amsterdam’s war time history in a broader perspective.

I will download it—hope it works with the iPad!

Synagogues in Northeastern/Eastern Poland

This post first appeared on my En Route blog for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal


By Ruth Ellen Gruber

I spent the past week in Sejny, a small town in the far northeast of Poland near the Lithuanian border—and coincidentally just ran across a very good video about the synagogues and Jewish quarters in Sejny and several other towns in eastern/northeastern Poland. It’s worth watching.

 

The video deals with the synagogues and Jewish districts in Sejny, Orla, Tykocin, and Bialystok. Lena Bergman, of the Jewish Historical Institute and one of the foremost experts on Jewish heritage in Poland, describes the architecture of the buildings and also the historical context in which they were/are set.

The 17th century synagogue in Tykocin was rebuilt in the 1970s as a Jewish Museum; that in Sejny, the so-called “White Synagogue”, now forms part of the premises of the Borderland Foundation, an innovative organization devoted to cultural, social and artistic interchange. (I was in Sejny for celebrations marking Borderland’s 22nd anniversary.)

The White Synagogue in Sejny. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber