Thousands visit Rome Jewish Museum, show Solidarity to Brussels

Visitors to Rome Jewish Museum Monday night. Photo: Shalom7

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

This post also appears on my En Route blog for the LA Jewish Journal

Thousands of people lined up to visit the Rome Jewish Museum, which was specially opened for free Monday night to show solidarity with the Jewish Museum in Brussels and honor the victims of Saturday's shooting attack, which left four dead.

Other Jewish institutions in Italy also opened Monday night -- including the Shoah Memorial in Milan.

“This is our response to the attack, a ‘white night’ against fear,” Rome Jewish community president Riccardo Pacifici told the Italian media.

In Rome, Jewish leaders and political figures including the presidents of the Lazio and Puglia regions addressed the crowd before they entered the museum. The ambassadors of Belgium and Israel also were in attendance at an opening ceremony broadcast live on Italian TV.

"The Brussels assassins wanted to strike in the heart of culture, in a place where one wants to learn," Pacifici said. "They wanted to intimidate the Jewish community and the general public. Tonight the museum opens its doors to whoever desires to get to know it."

"There is no choice more just than to find ourself in a place of culture in order to respond to hatred and ignorance," Nicola Zingaretti, president of Lazio region, said. "The act of us all being here sends out the message that whoever carries out an act of ignorance will always have the eyes of the world upon them."

Dario Disegni, the president of the Italian Jewish Cultural Heritage Foundation, issued a statement Monday urging the more than a dozen other Jewish museums in Italy to also open to the public for free one day this week. “We feel confident that civil society in our country will want to feel the moral imperative to bear witness, through solidarity with the victims of the crime, to a firm commitment to safeguarding democracy and to the construction of a future of peace, justice and liberty,” he said.

The Association of European Jewish Museums issued a statement about the Brussels attack:

A murderous attack has taken four lives in the Jewish Museum of Belgium in Brussels on Saturday 24 May. The AEJM is deeply shocked by this atrocity directed against an institution that for many years stands for mutual understanding, tolerance and intercultural exchange - a symbol for the only possible future of Europe. We lack the words to describe our feelings of horror and we humbly want to express our solidarity with our friends. Hopefully the murderer will be identified and caught soon and it will be possible to shed light on this crime. We mourn with our colleagues of the Jewish Museum in Brussels and the families of those who lost their loved ones in this attack.

Prague Jewish Museum opens new visitor center

Photo: Jewish Museum Prague

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

The Prague Jewish Museum is the most visited museum in the Czech Republic -- drawing more than half a million visitors a year.

So in a way, it's high time that it has opened a new visitor information and reservation center.

The new facility opened Feb. 3 at Meiselsa 15, close to the historic synagogues that house the museum's collections, as well as to other Jewish sites such as the Old-New synagogue, the Old Jewish cemetery and the Jewish Town Hall.

According to the museum’s announcement on its web site:

This new site provides visitors with a multimedia information space and offers a range of additional services. It is an interactive information gateway with basic details about the monuments and permanent exhibitions in the Jewish Town, as well as about specific Jewish monuments in Prague and the rest of the Czech Republic. It also contains information about current educational and cultural programmes held by the museum and related organizations and institutions. Visitors will also be given useful tips on where to find kosher meals and on services provided by travel agencies specializing in Jewish heritage tours. [...] As well as providing services for individual tourists, the new centre will also accept bookings from guides, school representatives and travel agencies. It also includes a rest area with refreshments and toilet facilities, as well as disabled access and a baby changing table.

In October, the museum will mark 20 years since it was given back to Jewish ownership by the state, and the new visitor center is just one of the initiatives and changes that are being implemented this year to mark the anniversary.

Big events in Poland next weekend

by Ruth Ellen Gruber

(This post also appears on my En Route blog for the LA Jewish Journal)

Two long-awaiting events are happening in Poland next weekend -- the opening of the Jewish museum installed in the restored synagogue in the little town of Chmielnik, and the opening of the restored synagogue in the town of Wielkie Oczy, which will now be used as the public library.

I've actually never seen the elegant synagogue in Wielkie Oczy, located in the southeastern corner of Poland on the Ukrainian border -- but I have long loved it from its photographs: its state of disrepair made it a particularly poignant image. Distinguished by its arched windows and doors, it was built in 1910 but rebuilt in 1927 after suffering serious damage in World War I. It was long used as a warehouse and office after World War II but had languished derelict for years in a steadily deteriorating condition.

A series of events  on June 16 will celebrate its reopening after a restoration funded by the town, with support from the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland. These will include the unveiling of a memorial plaque to the destroyed Jewish community, speeches, and a concert.

The development of the Jewish museum in Chmielnik, north of Krakow, is something that I have followed for years -- and it all comes to fruition June 15-16, with two days of events including a conference, concerts, talks and more.

Partially restored synagogue, July 2012. Photo © Ruth Ellen Gruber

I first saw the ruined synagogue, one of the largest buildings in the little town, back in 1990, when I made my first forays into documenting Jewish heritage sites. Originally built in the 1630s, it was, though derelict, still a splendid building, a massive masonry structure with barrel vaulting. The Nazis turned it into a warehouse, but the interior still retained stucco work dating from the 18th century, and the walls still bore traces of delicate polychrome decoration, including frescoes of lions, neoclassical geometric forms, and signs of the zodiac. 

Me and Piotr Krawczyk outside the synagogue under renovation, July 2012.

About a dozen years ago, young local activists, in particular Piotr Krawczyk, became interested in the Jewish history of the town -- which Krawczyk noted to me actually meant the history of the town: before the Holocaust, Jews made up about 80 percent of the population, but their memory and the memory of their contribution was long suppressed or forgotten.    

Inspired by the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow, Krawczyk and other activists, cooperating with the municipality, launched an annual Jewish culture festival in Chmielnik, held each June. They also started other initiatives, including clean-up of the ravaged Jewish cemeteries and erection of the memorial, as well as a web site about Jewish heritage, history and culture of the region.

The museum project has been the most ambitious project, entailing the renovation and transformation of the synagogue -- the design has been somewhat controversial because of a glass bimah installation.

Austria -- Vienna Jewish Museum Reopening

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Just a brief note -- the Jewish Museum in Vienna re-opened Tuesday after being closed for about a year for a fullscale -- and controversial -- restoration and revamping of its exhibition. I have yet to see it, but the next time I go to Vienna (probably in early December) I will make sure to give a full report, as I am very curious to see the new facility. The opening (temporary) exhibition is a sure-fire crowd pleaser on 100 years of Jewish experience in Hollywood...

Here's a video of the opening ceremony:

The Jewish Museum Vienna is now open - Welcome back! from Jewish Museum Vienna on Vimeo.



As for now, according to one brief (and dry) article:

Not only the technical infrastructure and visitor facilities were renovated, but visitors will also be offered new and exciting insights into the collections − of Jewish past and present − as well as a new atelier for children and several other services.

Visitors will get to know whom the Jewish Museum Vienna has to thank for its collections and take a virtual tour through the synagogues that existed in Vienna before 1938. They will also be invited to view the new permanent exhibition, but also to Hollywood − the location where the first temporary exhibition will take place. This will be an introduction to the founding fathers of the film metropolis, the men who left their shtetl in Galicia and Ukraine to invent the American dream in Hollywood. This journey will take one across 100 years of Hollywood and trace this Jewish experience as far as the present."

I posted here earlier this year about the controversy over the museum renovation, in the process of which the holograms that had formed part of the museum's historic exhibition, mounted in 1994, were destroyed during their removal.

Slovakia -- More highlights from Slovak Jewish Heritage Route -- Presov

Mezuzahs in Barkany Judaica collection. Photo: (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Here are further highlights from my five days following the Slovak Route of Jewish Heritage -- a  project  devised by my friend Maros Borsky, the leading expert on Jewish heritage in Slovakia. The author of the book Synagogue Architecture in Slovakia, Maros founded and directs the Slovak Jewish Heritage Center. You can see earlier posts on the trip HERE and HERE.

A major stop on the journey was the Presov, in the far east of Slovakia, the country's third largest city.

Here we visited the orthodox Jewish compound, centered on the large and sumptuous orthodox synagogue, built in 1898. It is a wonderfully ornate building -- still used by the tiny Jewish community -- that testifies to the one-time size and prosperity of the community here. The women's gallery houses the wonderful Barkany collected of Judaica that was collected for what was the first Jewish museum in the region, which opened in Presov in the 1920s. Alas, it is a branch of the State-run Museum of Jewish Culture in Bratislava and suffers the same lack of information on the objects. But what is there is really wonderful.

Exterior of Presov orthodox synagogue. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Door into sanctuary. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Presov: Ark and Ceiling. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Sanctuary. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Ceiling near Ark. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Click HERE for information about travel and tourism in Slovakia.