Czech Republic -- Memorial plaque on former Kutna Hora synagogue

Kutna Hora former synagogue. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

A memorial plaque to Holocaust victims has been placed on the former synagogue in Kutna Hora, a charming town an hour's drive east of Prague that is famous for its silver mines and St. Barbara church.

"The plaque was the idea of Mr Marek Lauermann, a young person who is a descendant of a Jewish family that was one of the few from Kutná Hora who partially survived the Holocaust. Marek has long been active in this area, he has released several publications, and he had this memorial plaque designed with our cooperation," Mayor Ivo Šanc said.[...]  The Culture to the Town (Kultura do města) association in Kutná Hora has long been involved in preserving the history of the small Jewish community there, which has almost vanished from the memory of its residents. The association organized events as part of the Year of Jewish Culture and published the book "Jews in the Kutná Hora Area - Forgotten Neighbors" (Židé na Kutnohorsku - Zapomenutí sousedé).

Read full story

Kutna Hora former synagogue. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Jews were barred from living in this mining town from 1568-1848. The surviving synagogue, at ul. Smiskova  619, was built in 1902 in Art Nouveau style. During World War II the Nazis derported the town's Jews to Terezin; few survived. During the war the synagogue was used as a factory making pipe organs. Since 1947 it has been used by the Hussite Church. Most of the decorative elements have been removed.


--

Prague -- Pinkas synagogue to be open tomorrow to commemorate deportations to Terezin

Monument at Terezin. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

As part of commemorations marking the 70th anniversary of the first deportations of Czech Jews to Terezin, the garrison town north of Prague used as a ghetto-concentration camp, the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague -- now a memorial to nearly 80,000 Holocaust victims in Bohemia and Moravia, will all names inscribed on its walls -- will be open free to the public on Sunday Nov. 27.

Poland -- Concern over preservation of "forgotten" Holocaust sites

Gate at Auschwitz. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

A fund-raising campaign for preservation of the infrastructure at Auschwitz has been achieving success. But focusing resources and attention on Auschwitz has raised concern that other Holocaust sites are crumbling. I wrote about this in a JTA article.

By Ruth Ellen Gruber  October 12, 2011 

ROME (JTA) -- Auschwitz, the most notorious camp in the Nazi killing machine, may soon claim success in its campaign to preserve the legacy of the Holocaust.

The foundation supporting the site in southern Poland has attracted tens of millions of dollars from donor countries, and the camp’s barracks and other buildings seem set to be preserved for decades to come. The museum memorial at the former Nazi death camp attracts more than 1 million visitors per year.

Some fear, however, that the concentration of resources and attention on Auschwitz could overshadow other preservation efforts and threaten the integrity or even the existence of the memorials and museums at lesser-known camps and Holocaust sites in Poland.

"Because Auschwitz is treated as the symbol of the Holocaust and the whole world is supporting only this museum, everybody in Poland, including the government, seems to think that this is enough," said historian Robert Kuwalek, a curator at the state-run Museum at Majdanek, the Nazi concentration camp and killing center near Lublin in eastern Poland. "The problem is deeper because it is the lack of basic knowledge that the Holocaust happened in forgotten sites like Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Chelmno.”

Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka were the three killing centers of the so-called Operation Reinhard plan to murder 2 million Polish Jews in 1942 and 1943. During that operation, Kuwalek said, "more people were killed in a shorter time than in Auschwitz-Birkenau during the whole period that that camp functioned."

Despite their importance in the history of the Holocaust, these and other sites -- such as the forced labor camps at Stuffhof and Gross-Rosen -- are overlooked by the vast majority of visitors who want to learn about the Holocaust or pay homage to its victims firsthand. All are marked by memorials or even museums. But some are located in remote parts of the country, and most are in serious need of upkeep and preservation.

The museum at Sobibor, for example -- the site of John Demjanjuk's crimes -- was forced to close in June when funding from local authorities ran out. An estimated 167,000 to 250,000 people, mostly Jews, were murdered at Sobibor, which is located in a remote part of eastern Poland. In May, a German court convicted Demjanjuk, now 91, of complicity in the murder of 28,000 Jews there.

"We simply realized that we could not afford to pay our bills this year, maintenance costs included," Marek Bem, a Sobibor museum spokesman, told the Krakow Post. "Without a stable budget we can't make any plans for the future."

The museum reopened July 1 after the Polish Culture Ministry announced that it would be reorganized as a state-run institution funded by the ministry.

"Auschwitz is the great exception to the rule," said Rabbi Andrew Baker, the director of international Jewish affairs for the American Jewish Committee. Baker was the point man for the AJC in its cooperation with the Polish government to build a large and impressive monument and museum at Belzec, where 500,000 Jews were killed. The center opened in 2004.

"With all the focus on Auschwitz, there's a kind of irony," he added. "It is coming that Auschwitz is becoming a universal symbol. It is raising money from scores of countries. When the survivors pass on, one question will be how to retain the identity of Auschwitz as a place where Jews were killed. It can become a universal place of lessons about genocide."

The Auschwitz Foundation was set up in 2009 with the goal of raising $163 million and thus guaranteeing an annual interest income of about $6 million for the much-needed conservation of barracks, the ruins of gas chambers, and other artifacts and material.

To date, nearly 20 countries have announced support for the effort, bringing the total pledges to more than $122 million. Germany alone pledged about $82 million. Israel was the latest country to pledge funds, with a $1 million contribution pledged to the foundation a few days before Rosh Hashanah.

In a statement quoted by the Auschwitz museum website, Yad Vashem director Avner Shalev explained why the investment was seen as so important.

"The site of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where over 1 million Jews were murdered during the Shoah, has become a key symbol of the Holocaust and of absolute evil," he said. "It is therefore a moral imperative to preserve the site's authenticity and legacy, and it is meaningful that Israel is participating in meeting that imperative."

The success to date of the Auschwitz fundraising campaign has been greeted with a cautious sigh of relief by scholars and preservationists who for years had raised the alarm about the threats to the site.

"It seems that the future of Auschwitz with regard to preservation is mostly secured," said Tomasz Kunciewicz, director of the Auschwitz Jewish Center, an educational institution in the town of Oswiecim, where Auschwitz is located. "Several governments have already made significant contributions, and others are expected to follow suit.

"However, regarding the more 'forgotten' death camps, such as Sobibor, the situation seems to be acute and there should be similar international efforts made regarding fundraising as in the case of Auschwitz."

In contrast to the 1.3 million visitors to Auschwitz last year, only about 30,000 go annually to Belzec, in southeastern Poland, and 20,000 visit Sobibor. Even Majdanek, which has a large museum and many more original buildings and other infrastructure than Auschwitz, attracts only about 100,000 annual visitors. The Majdanek museum is still coming to grips with a 2010 fire that destroyed one of the original barracks, where some of its key collections were stored.

"Everybody talks about the problems at Auschwitz," Kuwalek said. "Nobody pays attention to the other places. I'm really afraid that they were forgotten and will be forgotten."

Determining how to deal with these sites, he added, "will be a discussion that is more and more important. There is a recognition that something has to be done, but no one knows how and what."

Read the story at JTA HERE

Ukraine -- L'viv Jewish History Design Competition Winning Designs Viewable Online

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

The winning designs -- and all the other entries -- in the competition held in L'viv, Ukraine last year to mark three key sites of Jewish history in the city are now viewable online.

I was on the international Jury for the competition, and I described some of the process in a blog post here last December. Our brief was to consider some 70 designs sent in  from 14 different countries for projects marking three key sites, taking into consideration the following stated criteria:

The competition has two distinct, but interconnected purposes. First, the competiton seeks to respond to the growing awareness of Lviv's multi-ethnic past by contributing to the rediscovery of the city's Jewish history and heritage through creating public spaces dedicated to the city's historic Jewish community. Secondly, the competition also seeks ways to re-design these three open public spaces in such as manner as to improve the quality of life for the contemporary inhabitants and visitors of Lviv.

All the entries were judged anonymously -- we had no idea where they were from or who were the designers.

See all the designs for the Synagogue Square site -- the empty space in the heart of the downtown Jewish quarter where three now destroyed synagogues once stood -- by clicking HERE.

The winning design for the Synagogue Square site was by Franz Reschke, Paul Reschke, Frederik Springer Germany, based in Berlin, Germany.

See all the designs for the Besojlam Memorial Park, or Jewish cemetery, site by clicking HERE.

The first prize went to a design by Israeli designer and landscape architect Ronit Lambrozo. You can see that HERE.

See all the designs submitted for the site of the Janivski death and labor camp memorial by clicking HERE.

The first prize went to a dramatic but understated design by Ming-Yu Ho, Ceanatha La Grange, Wei Huang of Irvine, California.

Macedonia -- New Holocaust Museum Opens

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

There have been several articles about the opening of the new Holocaust Museum and Memorial in Skopje, Macedonia last week -- the opening marks an important step in coming to terms with the past and also was made possible by a landmark decision on post-Holocaust compensation.

The Forward writes:

The inspiration for the center came from Ivan Dejanov, president of the Macedonian Israeli Friendship Association, and its implementation has been led by principal consultant and Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum and by Victor Mizrahi, honorary consul of Israel in the Republic of Macedonia. It became possible, however, only with the enactment of the Law on Denationalization, which allows for restitution of money and property rights of Jews, even those without living heirs. The Macedonian government allocated 17 million euros to the Holocaust Fund for the Jews of Macedonia, and this eventually went toward the completion of the center and helped in the construction of the country’s only synagogue, in 2000. “It is almost unprecedented for a government to have acted in this way,” Mais said. “It’s an exemplary phenomenon.”

 It says:

The official celebrations marked only the first phase of the center. A special children’s museum will open in the complex in March 2012, to be followed by the permanent exhibition, in March 2013. The completion of all phases of the project coincides with “Skopje 2014,” a $273 million initiative to transform the city into a competitive European capital and rebuild its infrastructure after a 1963 earthquake that destroyed about 80% of the city’s architecture.

Read more: http://forward.com/articles/136212/#ixzz1Gz1hi9FY

 There are about 200 Jews in Macedonia -- I was present at the inauguration of Skopje's little synagogue in 2000 and have posted about other efforts to restore Jewish heritage.

My article on Holocaust memorials

 Budapest -- Holocaust memorial museum and education center. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

I have a brief article on Holocaust memorials in post-communist Europe, part of JTA's series related to the 20th anniversary of the fall of communism.

By Ruth Ellen Gruber, Oct. 30, 2009

ROME (JTA) -- Under communism, Jewish suffering in World War II generally was treated as a footnote to the overall losses in what the Soviets called the "Great Patriotic War."

Public monuments existed at some Holocaust sites in Eastern Europe, such as Auschwitz, the Paneriai forest near Vilnius where at least 70,000 Jews were killed, and Babi Yar, where tens of thousands of Jews were killed in ravines outside Kiev. But these usually commemorated generic "victims of fascism" and did not acknowledge the involvement of local collaborators.

Since the fall of communism 20 years ago, however, a host of new Holocaust memorials have gone up in post-communist states while and Communist-era monuments have been revamped by state authorities, local civic groups and Jewish organizations, giving the Jewish tragedy of World War II more prominence.

The new memorials range from simple plaques to modest monuments to huge memorial complexes, such as the monument at the Belzec death camp. A joint project of the Polish government and the American Jewish Committee, the monument was inaugurated in 2004 by the Polish president.
Some new sites, such as Belzec and the state-run Holocaust memorial center in Budapest, which also opened in 2004, include museums or educational facilities.

In other cases, including at Babi Yar and Paneriai, new inscriptions or components have been added to provide more accurate information and context in order for the memorial site to teach and inform as well as commemorate.

This can become contentious if, for example, the new inscriptions make reference to local collaboration in the killing of Jews.

"After the problem of funding, the hardest part of getting monuments and memorials erected has not been getting some kind of general consent, but it has been working out the specifics of the design and especially the language on the inscription," said the president of the International Survey of Jewish Monuments, Samuel Gruber, who has written about Holocaust memory and consulted on Holocaust monument projects.

"Most older memorials have been very general in their language, so much so that it is often hard to figure out what events are being commemorated, and rarely can one learn about who did what to whom and when,” he said.

This remains a concern, even with monuments whose positioning and design make them prominent. Some memorials form a striking symbolic presence, but provide little or no information as to what they commemorate. Visitors are presumed to know already what they represent.

In the heart of the Slovak capital Bratislava, for example, a chiseled image of a destroyed synagogue now serves as a Holocaust memorial. But other than the word "Remember," no information is provided on how the wartime fascist state collaborated with the Nazis in killing most of Slovakia's 135,000-strong prewar Jewish community.

Likewise, in Sopron, Hungary, a small but powerful sculptural monument depicting empty clothing hung outside the Auschwitz gas chambers stands near an abandoned synagogue. The memorial bears Hebrew lettering and the Sh’ma prayer, but no further information.

"How can one remember what one doesn't know?" Gruber said. "How can one 'not forget' what is never fully discussed or taught?"

On Slovakia’s Holocaust Memorial Day, Sept. 9, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico presided over the dedication of a memorial to Slovaks who helped rescue Jews at the time of the anti-Nazi Slovak National Uprising in 1944.

Funded by the Israeli Chamber of Commerce in Slovakia and several private sources, the memorial was built in the town of Zvolen next to the mass gravesite of Jews who were killed by the Nazis. It also includes a digital information point.

"This represents a different way of presenting Slovak national history that is at the same time a rejection of the [Nazi-allied] Slovak national puppet state of Josef Tiso," said Rabbi Andrew Baker, the American Jewish Committee's director of international Jewish affairs who has advised on Holocaust memorial projects in several countries. "Fico deserves credit for doing this, and he also speaks emotionally about the importance of Holocaust education in his country."

Though flawed at times, the memorials serve an important purpose.

"Memorials have a permanent presence," said Warren Miller, chairman of the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad, which has been involved in Holocaust memorial projects in Latvia, Romania, the former East Germany and other countries. "Going to a powerful memorial will help people want to learn more."

Romania -- New Holocaust Monument in Bucharest

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

A new National Holocaust memorial, commemorating Jews and Roma killed in the Shoah, will be dedicated in Bucharest on Thursday. President Traian Basescu laid the cornerstone for the memorial in 2006 and is expected to attend the dedication. The Romania Ministry of Culture, Religious Affairs and National Heritage described the monument, designed by Peter Jacobi, as "a contemporary expression of a memorial, the bearer of a message, a visible sign, an active space with which the public can interact freely." It includes five sculptures symbolizing Jewish and Roma suffering, a central memorial site and two installations using tombstones.

Construction of the monument was mandated by an international commission on the Holocaust in Romania, headed by Elie Wiesel, which released a 400-page report in 2004. As many as 380,000 Jews, and thousands of Roma, were killed in the Holocaust in Romanian-occupied territories.

Until now, the only Holocaust memorial in Bucharest was one erected by the Jewish community in 1991 in front of the main Choral Synagogue.

Holocaust memorial in front of the Choral Synagogue, Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Sam Gruber has posted a detailed article on Holocaust memorials in Romania on his blog.