Ukraine --New York Times on Bruno Schulz murals

The other day I posted information on the (stolen) murals by Bruno Schulz going on show (finally) at Yad Vashem.... here's a link to a New York Times piece on the exhibit.

Restuarant U (Thai food) at Batu Pahat, Johor

(N1°51.587' E103°00.322')
Visited one of my buddy (Lee) who operating a minimart at Batu Pahat which is opposite of Sharp Roxy Factory.
We been invited by him to one of the Restaurant nearby for dinner. This is a Authentic Thai Restaurant operated by a Siamese.

All order made by Lee. He did a very good recommendation!!

Our order :-
1) Vegetables
2) Thai Style Fried chicken (for kids, cause they can't take spicy)
3) Omelette
4) Sweet sour Squid
5) Thai Style Steam Fish
6) Authentic Thai Tomyam

Vegetables

Thai Style Fried Chicken

Omelette

Sweet Sour Squid

Thai Style Steam Fish

Authentic Thai Tomyam

We really enjoyed the dinner very much!
The Tomyam was not the normal type that we can have it everywhere. It was Excellent! Same goes with the Squid and the Steam Fish!
If you happen here and you can take spicy, these are the dishes that you MUST try! Cannot miss!

The total damage : MYR120.00 (For 4 adults and 2 children)
The cost was reasonable!
I rated : 4.6/5

I called this is a 'Hidden' Thai Food Restaurant!

The Restaurant had closed.

MY TRIPS - Home

Lithuania -- Paradox, contradictions and a new Jewish tourism office

Synagogue in Vilnius. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Haaretz has run a long and very interesting article discussing the schizophrenia exhibited by Lithuanian authorities vis-a-vis Jews, Jewish culture, historic memory and the like. It is pegged to a "cultural offensive" by the Lithuanian Embassy keyed to the Jerusalem International Book Fair.

This cultural offensive, however, is not being welcomed wholeheartedly. Despite the fact that one of the sessions to be presented at the fair will deal directly with the subject of the Holocaust (Is It Still Difficult to Speak about the Holocaust in Lithuania? at 5 P.M. Tuesday), the Lithuanian-sponsored campaign has been met with some derision by those who see it as a mere fig leaf to cover an official reluctance in the country to deal with its anti-Semitic past.

Calling Lithuania's participation in the book fair "propaganda," Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Israel office, told Haaretz that Lithuania, the country with the highest percentage of Jews killed during the Holocaust, has been a 'total failure' at bringing Nazi collaborators to justice.

Read the Full Article


The article, by Raphael Ahren, is thoughtful and presents a good picture of the contradictions and paradoxes of the situation.

He quotes the Lithuanian ambassador to Israel as being

convinced that her country's interest in its Jewish past is genuine and sincere. Jews have been in Lithuania for already six or seven centuries, they're a part of our culture and it's part of our mentality, part of heritage and history, she said when asked about her country's presence at the book fair. The Jews who lived in Lithuania before World War II contributed a lot to our culture, philosophy and mentality, and also to research in a lot of scientific fields. The Baltic country wants to present those parts of our history to the Israeli public, she said.

The Vilnius Yiddish Institute opened at the University of Vilnius in 2001, there is a new Jewish tourism office in the capital city, and in 2007 a Jewish nursery school started teaching Yiddish to its children in an attempt to preserve the language as Ashkenazi Jews' mother tongue.

Recently, however, I got a long email from Wyman Brent, detailing some of the bureaucratic (and other) problems he has had in trying to put together and donate a Jewish library to Vilnius... Last I heard, he has 165 boxes of books en route as a gift to the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum, but, he says, "The museum is in dire straits as the government is now saying that it will no longer pay for the necessities of water, gas and electricity" and one of the museum's buildings may have to close down....

Germany -- Emigration Museum/Jewish Museum deal

In the Czech Emigration Museum, Lichnov, 2005. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

The German Emigration Center in Bremerhaven -- a museum specializing on the topic of emigration -- got in touch with me a few days ago to bring to my attention a new ticket deal they have with the Jewish Museum in Berlin.

Visitors, in short, can buy pay the entrance fee to one of these museums and visit the other on the same ticket -- within three months of the original visit.

It sounds like a good deal to me!

I haven't visited the Emigration Center in Bremerhaven -- but I think that that is where my own grandparents (and probably great-grandparents) sailed from en route to the United States.

Indeed, as the museum points out, more than 7 million emigrants gathered in Bremerhaven between 1830 and 1974 to board a ship headed for the New World. Among them were 3 million Eastern Europeans (my own ancestors, from what today is Romania and Lithuania, would have been among them).

The German Emigration Center is Europe’s largest theme museum and in 2007 was named European Museum of the Year. It is located on the site where the ships departed from the European mainland. It features reconstructions and multimedia productions to illustrate the history of emigration. Visitors can also trace their family roots.

The Jewish Museum in Berlin presents objects form everyday life and art objects, photos, letters etc. that tell the story of German Jewish life from the Middle Ages up to the present day. It is famous for is spectacular architecture, by Daniel Libeskind.

There are, in fact, several museums in Europe that deal with emigration. In the little town of Buttenheim, Germany, for example, the Levi Strauss museum, in the birthplace of the inventor of blue jeans, uses Strauss's life story to tell the more general tale of (Jewish) economic emigration in the 1840s.

More general emigration museums include the big the Ulster American Folk Park, opened in Northern Ireland in 1976, which tells the story of emigration from Ireland. There is a small museum on Czech emigration to Texas in Lichnov, in the eastern part of the Czech Republic.

My latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column -- klezmer music and the ghost of German past

Me and the Painted Bird in Freiburg

Here's a link to my latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column -- on Punk Cabaret klezmer danse macabre in Germany. In other words, a concert in Freiburg by Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird at the height of the uproar over the pope's rehabilitation of a Holocaust-denying bishop... I've written about klezmer music in Germany a lot over the years (including in a long section of my 2002 book, Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe.) The scene keeps changing and evolving -- and the political edge and genre mix of Daniel's group illustrates this. It may not be "pure" pre-war shtetl music, but it's rooted there, and it takes the music into the 21st century. It was a great concert, and the band's new CD -- Partisans and Parasites, is also worth buying.

FREIBURG, Germany (JTA) -- At the height of the recent uproar over Pope Benedict XVI's rehabilitation of a Holocaust-denying bishop, I attended a klezmer concert in the pontiff's native Germany.

The timing was coincidental. I didn't deliberately set out to counter the pernicious folly of denying history by listening to music rooted in the culture the Nazis sought to destroy.

Still, the concert started me to thinking -- about what and how we remember; about what and how we forget; and about the role contemporary cultural expressions play in determining how we think about things.

I had been to many klezmer concerts in Germany in the past. The traditional music of East European Jews has had a wide following here since the 1980s, when American and other artists began to tour. Scores of homegrown klezmer bands have been formed, and several leading American Jewish music performers settled in Berlin or elsewhere in the country.

Germany's particular history, of course, played a role in the music's popularity.

Some Germans, especially those from older generations, became attracted as part of the manifold process of dealing with the Nazi legacy that is commonly known here as "working through the past."

For more youthful musicians and fans, however, the baggage of guilt is mostly absent. For some, the klezmer sound simply forms part of the eclectic exoticism of world music. For others, its rich cultural contexts provide stimulus for their own creative interpretation.

The group I saw this time was The Painted Bird, a Berlin-based band pointedly named for the Holocaust novel by Jerzy Kosinski. Known for making music with a sharp political edge, the band describes itself on its MySpace page as "Punk Cabaret + Radical Yiddish Song + Gothic American Folk + Klezmer Danse Macabre."

Its leader is Daniel Kahn, a 30-year-old Detroit native who forms part of the current wave of American Jewish musical transplants to the German capital.

Read Full Article

South Africa -- Jewish Museum

This is a little far afield, but here's a link to an article by Dan Fellner about Jewish heritage sites in Cape Town, South Africa -- where, apparently, 80 percent of the Jewish population has roots in Lithuania....

Most of the important Jewish sites, including the South African Jewish Museum, the Gardens Shul, Cape Town Holocaust Center and Gitlin Library, are located in the same complex on an outdoor square in the heart of downtown Cape Town, just four blocks from the South African Parliament.

A focus was the Jewish Museum, which, the article says, attracts 15,000 visitors a year and features a "reconstructed shtetl from Riteve, Lithuania in the 1880s" with "a scale model of a school, shop and modest house. Inside the home, the table is set for Shabbat dinner."

The entrance to the museum is through the exterior of the first synagogue built in South Africa, which was consecrated in 1863. Inside are the original wooden ark and mosaic floor and other artifacts from the synagogue. [...] every window in the museum has a view of Table Mountain, which is what the Jewish immigrants first saw when arriving in Cape Town by ship.

The museum depicts what life was like for those immigrants and does so with high-tech and interactive exhibits, including a bank of touch-screen computers where visitors can research their family roots.

[...]

The museum also showcases the role played by Jews in the struggle against apartheid, including Isie Maisels, who was Nelson Mandela's defense lawyer during the 1963 trial that led to Mandela's incarceration for treason, and Helen Suzman, who for many years was the sole anti-apartheid voice in the South African Parliament.

Read Full Article

You can also read the article and see pictures on Dan Fellner's web site. Click HERE.

Malta -- Controversy over Jewish Catacombs. Religion versus Archeology

Controversy is brewing in Malta over the ancient Jewish catacombs. According to the Times of Malta, it appears to center over who has control of the site, what the site should represent -- purely a religious burial ground, or also a site of important archeological significance -- and how to reconcile the two.

The Jewish catacombs in Rabat were at the centre of controversy in recent days after Heritage Malta called in police when a Jewish religious delegation allegedly entered the site without authorisation.

The Jewish community in Malta is demanding that the human bones found inside the catacombs are given a proper burial according to Jewish rites.

A Jewish delegation made up of at least 10 experts, Rabbis and archaeologists from Israel and the US was brought over to Malta by the Jewish community to carry out the burial.

Heritage Malta CEO Luciano Mulè Stagno confirmed that a Jewish delegation last week entered the site without authorisation, a claim denied by a representative of the Jewish community in Malta.

"We lodged a police report and for some time a policeman was also placed on guard outside the entrance," Dr Mulè Stagno said.

Lawrence Attard Bezzina, a representative for the Jewish community, denied that the delegation entered the site unlawfully..

[ . . . .]

"We are seeking an agreement that respects their requests but is also in line with Maltese legislation. The Jewish community are looking at the site purely in religious terms as a burial site. We concur with the idea but for us it is more than just that because it is an important archaeological site of unique value," Dr Mulè Stagno said.

The site, which is across the road from the entrance to St Paul's catacombs, has never been open to the public and is currently being restored by Heritage Malta with EU funds.

The Jewish catacombs form part of the larger St Paul's catacombs complex in Rabat and were discovered at the end of the 19th century. They date back to the late Roman period some 1,500 years ago and are unique since they are Jewish catacombs within a Christian complex.

Read full article -- and make sure to take a look at the comments

Ukraine/Israel -- Finally! Removed (or Stolen) Bruno Schulz Murals Go On View

Ruined Drohobych synagogue, 2006. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Back in 2001, Yad Vashem’s secret removal from Ukraine of Holocaust-era wall paintings by the Polish-Jewish artist Bruno Schulz touched off an international controversy. You can find links to a number of articles on the affair, including a New York Times op-ed by Sam Gruber, on the Ukraine page of the www.isjm.org web site -- click HERE then scroll down.

Yad Vashem officials physically removed parts of the murals, which have fairy tale themes, from the walls of a villa in the town of Drohobych and smuggled them out of the country to Jerusalem.

In a statement, Yad Vashem said it had the “moral right” to the paintings.

"The correct and most suitable place to commemorate the memory of the Jewish artist, Bruno Schulz -- killed by an SS officer purely because he was a Jew -- and the place to house the drawings he sketched during the Holocaust is Yad Vashem," it said.

But the move triggered outrage in Poland and Ukraine, where Schulz's works are revered as national treasures -- and where removal of art from the wartime period is strictly regulated by national law. It also drew sharp reaction from international experts involved in the protection and preservation of Jewish heritage.

Now, with the dispute settled and the mural fragments restored and conserved, Yad Vashem is finally putting them on display -- it presented them publicly last week.

The exhibition "Bruno Schulz: Wall Painting Under Coercion," includes fragments of three murals depicting dwarfs, princesses, horses and carriages, along with images evoking Schulz's struggles during the Holocaust. ...

The dispute was settled last year; Israel recognized the Schulz works as the property and cultural wealth of Ukraine, and the Drohobychyna Museum in Ukraine agreed to give them to Yad Vashem on long-term loan.

Ukrainian Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Vladislav Kornienko took part in Friday's inauguration of the new display at Yad Vashem.

"The paintings have artistic, cultural, national and historic significance both to the Jewish people and the Ukrainian people," he said. "For almost 60 years these paintings were considered legend. Today, they are revealed to this generation and to generations to come."

Read Full Article

Gunung Ledang Resort (Mount Ophir), Johor

Gunung Ledang Resort located at the foothill of Gunung Ledang (Mount Ophir) (N2°20.956' E102°38.166').

It seems like the whole resort refurnished. It's looks nice and clean! I cannot remember my last visit....

The Reception of the Resort

I love this place very much! Especially the nature! It's actually a nice place for breakaway!
Let me show you some pictures of the Resort...

The first signboard you see once you enter the Resort territory...

On your left, there are ATV for rent...

Further in, you reach the Resort Reception (The first picture above), the swimming pool on the right once you enter the lobby...

I just parked my car right on the front of the Chalet.

Chalet of the Gunung Ledang Resort

There are total of 4 rows of the chalet, I believe this the standard chalet which is MYR150.00 per day.

Beautiful landscape and clean...

The room rate :-
Deluxe Room - MYR200.00
Standard Room - MYR150.00
Jungle Cabin - MYR50.00

Contact info :-
Bt 28, Jalan Segamat,
84020 Sagil,
Tangkak.
Tel : 06-9772888
Fax : 06-9773555

As you walk towards the waterfall, you will pass by a row of souvenir shop and the last unit is the Ranger Office.

The Ranger Office.

I had been looking at the Ranger office for more information of the hike of Gunung Ledang (Mount Ophir), but too bad there was nobody around after 30 minutes waiting....

Very bad for tourist....the office was empty!

But there was a notice on the wall stated :
1) Only day trip climbing (hiking) activities by booking are acceptable.
2) All climbing (hiking) activities must use Entrance B due to the safety of the Climbers (hikers).
3) Walk-in climbers (hikers) will not be served. The booking can be made by lettering to Johor National Park or calling at 019-7772057. Thank you.

Poor english....

Opposite of the souvenir shop, there's a mini food court.

You can have your Teh Tarik and relax over the wonderful nature!

After this row of shops, that is the area where everyone can soak in the cold water during the hot day!

The jungle trekking trail...

We will stay one night over here on 21st March 2009. That will be the Mega GG (Gathering) of Malfreemaps.
I will blog more detail after this holiday at Gunung Ledang (Mount Ophir) Resort.

Related post :-
* Camping on Mount Ophir (Gunung Ledang), Johor
* Hike on Mount. Ophir (Gunung Ledang), Johor
* Malfreemaps.com Mega GG (Gathering) at Gunung Ledang 2009

MY TRIPS - Home

International Kite Festival 2009 - Pasir Gudang, Johor.

This year the International Kite Festival fall on 17th FEB - 22nd FEB 2009.
There are total 26 countries participate and more than 200 contestants.

I visited the Bukit Layang-Layang (Kite Hill) (N1°28.552' E103°54.254') on the forth day, to avoid the crowded situation at the weekend.

Quite lucky that, the place were not the pack! Many parking lots available. That time was 5pm.


There were many stalls selling souvenirs and also 'Kite'. The price for one kite (MYR2.00) was rather cheap!

Dry Flowers Stall

Kite Stall. That guy was promoting his kite...

The Kite Museum and the unique roof top design.

Beside that, all those famous fast food stall also heavily promoting their foods! Like KFC, Pizza Hut and others...

The Chick happily walking around...

There's also the kid ATV and Pocket bike for rental. MYR10.00 for 15 minutes.

So, let's see what we have here!

Sky Actions
It was a windy day!
This is the only time where all the Fishes and others sea creatures are allow to Fly on the sky, not swimming anymore!

Beautiful Stingray and friend...

Giant Octopus

This is Group Performance.

This Tiger (I think so...) is about to raise....

Even the Fast food also on the sky?!

Kites were everywhere...

The Poor Crocodile stuck on the lamp pole...

Giant Frog

Cheese cake? Or Ice Cream?

Giant Dragonfly??!!

The owner of the Dragonfly and the pros beside...

If there's a up, there's a down...

Ground Actions

The little girl and her little kite...

MMHE's Kite spotted!

Is this a 'Kite'??

Seems like my kite doesn't listen to me anymore...

All the Lady birds are waiting for performance!

Photos under the tent

The Japan Team

The German Team

The Korea Team

The Tailand, Singapore, Malaysia and German Team

Let me have a nap, hopefully my kite is still there when I wake up...

No matter how....I gonna make my baby fly!

The China Team and the Tianjin Power Kite Club

During that time, I manage to watch the Performance from Mr Ron of America.
Once the music started, Mr Ron and his kite dance together at the middle of the field.

Mr Ron dancing on the field

The purple kite from Mr Ron disturb by the monster...

Others photos

The temporary Toilet

Flags of all the countries

Too bad the ladies team from China start to perform after I left the Kite Hill....I miss the show...

The Ladies Team from China. The 13 states of Malaysia Kite at the back...

Related post :-
* International Kite Festival 2008

MY TRIPS - Home