NY Jewish Week profiles me & my Jewish heritage work

Me in Hostice, CZ, in front of the long-abandoned synagogue

Writing in the New York Jewish Week, travel writer Hilary Danailova profiles me and my Jewish heritage and Jewish heritage travel work, including the Jewish Heritage Europe web site. 

Heritage Tourism In Europe

10/13/15

Hilary Danailova

From Poland to Portugal, nobody knows Jewish Europe like Ruth Ellen Gruber.

On a given week, the Philadelphia-born journalist might be checking out a newly opened museum, inspecting the restoration of a prewar synagogue, or picking her way through forest brambles in search of long-lost tombstones. That explains how Gruber found herself recently in the wilderness south of Prague, where she stumbled onto an 18th-century Jewish cemetery in a clearing near a faded sign marking “Synagogue Street.”

“Here’s this place in the middle of nowhere, and actually, there used to be a synagogue here,” recalled Gruber, who was sleuthing with the aid of locals. “It gave me that sense of discovery that I used to find everywhere. When I find a place that thrills me or makes me feel that sense of wonder again … I loved it.”

The thrill of discovery is something Gruber shares with a growing number of enthusiasts through the website she oversees, Jewish Heritage Europe. A project of the Rothschild Foundation (Hanadiv) Europe, JHE is a comprehensive web portal for all things Jewish overseas: festivals, institutions, scholarship, synagogues and cemeteries.

Under Gruber’s direction, JHE has evolved into an essential travel resource. With an engaging redesign and the recent launch of “Have Your Say,” a feature that invites interactive commentary, JHE makes Jewish Europe more accessible — and more communal — than ever.

Gruber has long occupied a front-row seat for the show that is modern Europe. Since the 1970s, she has reported from abroad for many major news outlets in North America; currently JTA’s senior European correspondent, next summer she will lead her first European Jewish heritage tour for The New York Times. [...]

Read the entire article on the Jewish Week web site

New tourism app for Jewish Basel, Switzerland

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

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

Going to Basel, Switzerland and interested in Jewish life and heritage?

Then you'll want to get a new app for smartphones and tablets that is officially being launched on August 26.

Called "Baleph," the app is designed for both IOS and Android platforms and is in English and German.

It leads the user on a "stroll through Basel's Jewish history" via a 13-stop, multimedia walking tour that highlights Jewish history in the city from the middle ages to the present. Featuring  text, sound, and images, an Interactive timeline, and a city map with GPS function, it contains 65 minutes of audio material covering a tour lasting 1 ½ to 2 hours.

Here are the links:

iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/baleph/id895724718?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D4

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.merianstiftung.baleph&hl=en

Website: www.baleph.ch

July Jewish Heritage Newsletter: Czech 10 Stars; Photo Galleries

Bimah and reconstructed Ark in the synagogue in Mikulov. Photo © Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Please take a look at the July edition of the monthly newsletter of Jewish Heritage Europe -- the website on Jewish heritage issues that I coordinate as a project of the Rothschild Foundation (Hanadiv) Europe.

Access it by clicking here -- and sign up for regular monthly delivery.

This issue has two main "cover stories," plus links to other news from Poland, France, Austria, Hungary and elsewhere.

One cover theme  is the launch of new Photo Galleries on JHE -- galleries that readers are encouraged to contribute to.

The other is the inauguration in June of the wonderful Czech 10 Stars project, one of the most ambitious single Jewish heritage projects in Europe, linking 10 synagogues and associated Jewish heritage sites, in 10 towns all over the Czech Republic: in Úštěk, Jičín, and Brandýs nad Labem to the north; Plzeň and Březnice to the west; Nová Cerekev and Polná in the south-central part of the country; and Boskovice, Mikulov and Krnov to the east.

Synagogue interior, Polná. Photo © Ruth Ellen Gruber

They have all been renovated (or re-renovated) with a mono-thematic exhibit installed in each to form 10 regional centers of Jewish culture and education (and tourism) -- sort of a nationwide Jewish museum..... (See previous JHE posts on the progress of the 10 Stars project HERE and HERE and HERE.)

Carried out by the Federation of Jewish Communities in the Czech Republic, the 10 Stars was financed by an approximately €11 million grant from the EU, with further funding from the Czech Culture Ministry.

I traveled hundreds of kilometers over the past few weeks to visit seven of these sites -- and have posted galleries of pictures from most of them.

10 Stars web site

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.

Recent updates from Jewish Heritage Europe

Postcard showing Chmielnik synagogue and the Archangel Gabriel

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

As I have begun to do on a regular basis, I'm posting here last week's updates from www.jewish-heritage-europe.eu, the web site that I coordinate as a project of the Rothschild Foundation Europe. There's news mainly from Poland, Ukraine and Belarus.

I post on the JHE newsfeed several times a week, to keep content dynamic on what we aim to make the go-to web site for Jewish heritage issues in Europe. JHE will celebrate two years online next month, and we are planning to expand the enhance the site with new features.

Meanwhile -- please subscribe to the JHE news feed! You can use the subscribe buttons on the home page or on any of the news pages. The deal is that, on days that I post on the JHE news feed, you will receive one email with the links to the posts. Easy, convenient and informative, no? And you won't miss any of the feed.

Look at all the news we ran last week:


"Shtetl Routes" under development with EU grant in Poland-Belarus-Ukraine border region

An ambitious, international “Shtetl Routes” tourism itinerary through a score or more of towns in the Poland-Belarus-Ukraine border region is under development with a more than €400,000 grant from the European Union’s Cross-border Cooperation Programme Poland-Belarus-Ukraine 2007-2013.

Call for Papers: Conference “Urban Spaces of Lviv/Lwów/Lemberg: Imagination, Experiences, Practices”

Commemorative postcard of Chmielnik synagogue

Call for papers: New Research on Memory in Eastern Europe conference in Warsaw

Aim of the workshop is to discuss specificity of the collective memory and research of that memory in Ukraine and Belarus

Dariusz Stola named director of Museum of the History of Polish Jews

Report on Jewish Cemeteries in Silesia Province Published

The Brama Cukerman (Cukerman’s Gate) Foundation in Będzin, Poland, has recently published “Our Cemeteries,” a detailed, 50-page report on the state and status of the dozens of Jewish cemeteries in the Silesia Vojvodship (Province).

Round-up of Jewish cemetery restoration news in Poland

Volunteers clearing up the Jewish cemetery in Zambrów. Photo courtesy of FODZ

By Ruth Ellen Gruber


There's quite a lot going on in Poland regarding the restoration and preservation of Jewish cemeteries, most of which lay neglected and abandoned for decades.

Check out this post on the Jewish Heritage Europe web site for a round up of various initiatives from Żarki, Zambrów, Błędów, Łabiszyn and Strzelno.

It includes a link to a comprehensive Jewish Culture Trail in Żarki financed by local and regional authorities. It takes in the surviving local synagogue (used as a culture center), the surviving Jewish cemetery, houses, shops, urban structure and the WW2 ghetto.

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!

Impressive Jewish Visitors' Center in Brno

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


By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Once again I have to hand it to the Czechs for the exemplary way that they preserve and promote Jewish heritage, heritage sites and memory.

I spent a day this past week in Brno, the Czech Republic’s second largest city and the capital of Moravia. I was there for a totally different —- non-Jewish—reason (a country music concert and a meeting related to the Czech country music and bluegrass scene) but I took the time to visit the Jewish Tourism and Information Center that was opened last year at the city’s Jewish cemetery, a sprawling and beautifully maintained expanse that includes about 9,000 grave markers, from simple matzevot to grand family tombs.

The Center operates as part of the Jewish Brno Project, a collaborative initiative of the Jewish community in Brno and the city’s Tourist Information Center.

A deceptively boring view of the Jewish Visitors Center. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

I was already a big fan of the project’s web site www.jewishbrno.eu—an informative and easy to use portal to Jewish heritage in Brno and at least 16 towns in southern Moravia where there are historic synagogues, cemeteries and old Jewish quarters – Mikulov, Boskovice, Trebic, Ivancice, et al.
The Brno Jewish Visitor’s Center opened in January 2011, and it sports the green “i” logo of general Czech tourist info centers. It occupies one of the three early 20th century buildings that form the mortuary complex.

The Cemetery is located at Nezamyslova 27, in the Zidenice district of town, an easy tram ride from the city center. Trams 8 and 10 from the main railway station stop right in front.

The Visitors Center provides a range of services, including guided tours of Brno Jewish sites, tourist packages and itineraries outside the city. There are stacks of free informational material, including well-produced brochures in various languages on local and regional Jewish heritage. The Center has free WiFi internet access, and there is an English-speaking staffer.

For the cemetery itself, it provides individual free tours as well as free audio guides. A brochure guide to the cemetery includes a map locating the graves of prominent people interred there – the brochure provides brief biographies and photos of their gravestones. And there is also a computer screen with a link to the cemetery database, so that you can search for individual tombs.

I didn’t have much time the day I visited, but I spent a very pleasant half hour strolling around the cemetery and following the map up and down the rows of tombs – most of them stately obelisks, and many (in the style of the late 19th century) bearing laminated photographs of the deceased.

Brno was a center of modernist architecture. Here's a modernist gravestone in the Jewish cemetery. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Jewish Tourism and Information Center

Nezamyslova 27
615 00 Brno, Czech Republic
Email: tic@jewishbrno.eu
Tel: +420 544 526 737

Brno Tourist Information Center

Radnicka 8
658 78 Brno, Czech Republic
Email: info@ticbrno.cz
Tel: +420 542 427 150
www.ticbrno.cz

Web Site Aimed at Jewish Visitors to the Summer Olympics in London

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


By Ruth Ellen Gruber


The Summer Olympic Games in London, July 27-August 12, are just around the corner (more or less) and to help Jewish visitors and sports fans, the Jewish Committee for the London Games has launched VISIT JEWISH LONDON —a web site with a wide variety of information, from sightseeing to synagogue-going.

It looks like a very useful and easy to use resource. This is what the web site says it aims to do:

Our goal is to ensure that all visitors have access to relevant Jewish cultural and religious information. To this end we have created this website for you, which aims to provide a one stop shop presenting comprehensive information on Jewish London and the U.K. as a whole in order to help you access everything that you may need during your visit.

The site is also intended to provide appropriate and updated information about the 2012 London Olympic Games, which includes links to partner groups and networks concerned with the wider values and the future legacy of the Games, as well as the Official site of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the Metropolitan Police, public bodies and other faith based and religious organisations specifically involved with the Olympic Truce. The Olympic Truce is an original Olympic ideal which aims to ensure that competitors and visitors travel to the Games in peace and security.

You may want to attend a synagogue while you are here in order to participate in a shabbat service, make up a minyan or perhaps you have a yahrzeit and want to say kadesh. We can point you in the direction of a designated commemoration associated with the Games or where shabbat hospitality is available. We have also provided details of the Jewish Museum, Judaic books and gift shops, guided walking tours as well as particulars of other interesting iconic, cultural and famous historical Jewish sites in London.

We aim to provide you with a variety of opportunities to ensure you enjoy a warm, welcoming and interesting visit whilst taking advantage of all that the great city of London has to offer its guests. If you keep strictly kosher, you will need to know where to go to eat, so we have provided information about where you can find kosher or deli style provisions and dine in a wide range of supervised and unsupervised restaurants. So whether you’re into chopped liver, chicken soup, shwarma, falafel, humus, pitta or pizza, we’ve got the nosh for you!

UK -- More on London's East End

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Here's another detailed travel story (in Jewish Week) about London's former Jewish quarter, the East End. The author, Stephen Burstin, conducts Jewish themed tours. For more information, click HERE

The oldest surviving synagogue in England, Bevis Marks, today straddles the border between the East End and the city’s financial district. Founded in 1701 primarily by Dutch Jews whose descendants had fled the Spanish Inquisition, it is Sephardic. Its original interior is perfectly intact, including the beautiful Renaissance-style ark.

Bevis Marks boasts several famous sons, most notably the 19th-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, whose father turned his back on Judaism and converted the family to Christianity when Benjamin was 12. This did not stop an Irish member of Parliament from later insulting the young politician’s Jewish roots. But Disraeli famously retorted: “Yes, I am a Jew. But while the right honourable gentleman’s ancestors were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the Temple of Solomon.”

Many sites in the East End continue to provide reminders of the neighborhood’s rich Jewish heritage; at one time Jews made up 95 percent of the population. There’s the soup kitchen that served 5,000 meals a day during the Depression years; now, paradoxically, its retained ornate facade provides a frontage to luxury apartments. Across Commercial Street in revitalized Spitalfields, $1.5 million homes vie with each other to maintain the best-kept Jewish secrets from unknowing passers-by.

Czech Republic -- a Zionist take on touring Jewish Prague

Inside the Jubilee Synagogue, Prague. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

There's a detailed travel story in the Jerusalem Post by Stewart Weiss about his visit to Jewish Prague. Prague has been visited and toured and written about so much that it's really hard to find a way to say anything new, or really to express any new emotion about it, its Jewish history, the impact of visiting Jewish sites and remembering both pogroms and the Holocaust.....I packed a lot of it in in my chapter on Prague in my 1994 book Upon the Doorposts of Thy House, including a critique of mass tourism....



Weiss article goes over much of the same material. He is ever-skeptical at the tour guide spin (though as a tour leader himself, he must know how to keep his audience.....).

The first stop on our trip is the ancient Jewish cemetery in the heart of Josefov, the Jewish Quarter. Because the land allotted to the Jews was woefully insufficient to bury their dead, there are at least seven layers of graves lying deep beneath the surface, where as many as 100,000 people are buried. But while the graves are invisible, the tombstones are ubiquitous, and stretch as far as the eye can see. They stand as silent, solemn witnesses to the past 1,000 years, from the time Jewish settlers first came to Bohemia, and they testify to a nation within a nation that included every conceivable vocation, from salesman to seamstress to scholar.

The greatest of these scholars was Rabbi Yehuda Loew, the famed Maharal of Prague (1525-1609). In lesser intellectual circles – and certainly among the tour guides peddling fantasy to wide-eyed visitors seeking same – he was the progenitor of the Golem, a clay figure brought to life in order to protect the downtrodden disciples of the Maharal.

It is strange to me, though, that  in what he calls "four days of walking with ghosts" he seems to have totally missed the lively local  Jewish community and local Jewish life -- writing only that Chabad  "struggles valiantly to provide a working synagogue."


Read full story HERE