Jewish Folk Art • Jüdische Volkskunst

 

"Die Stimme", 01-MAY-1950: “We received the following letter: In the article by André Spire reproduced in the previous issue of your newspaper, the gravestones that Dr. Diamant showed in Czernowitz are compared with those in the Prague Jewish Cemetery, among others. What is remarkable about them, however, is that they have nothing in common with those. The Prague stones, for example, were created by Christian stonemasons in the style and ornamentation of the Christian environment there. The stones that Diamant discovered in northern Bukovina, the southern tip of Eastern Galicia, and Moldavia were carved by Jewish stonemasons, members of the Chewrah Kadischah, in fulfillment of a sacred duty. They are worked from left to right, the writing itself is a means of expression, the ornamentation harks back to ancient symbolic motifs from the Middle East and is often completely redesigned. The craftsmen often succeeded in expressing something of the nature of the person buried beneath the stone (see, for example, the gravestone of a young girl or that of the rabbi in Diamant's book). Diamant was therefore right to claim that he had discovered a kind of Jewish folk art in these stones. In doing so, he refuted the assumption that we Jews are incapable of developing folk art. These stones have such richness and power of expression that they are something entirely unique and become an experience for the viewer.Diamant's book “Jüdische Volkskunst” [Jewish Folk Art] was published by Präger Verlag, Vienna, but due to a lack of funds it had to be printed in Czernowitz and the clichés for the illustrations were obtained in Bucharest, not always to our full satisfaction. A subscription in Vienna, followed by one in Czernowitz, covered part of the printing costs; Diamant himself paid the rest, just as he had often restored the gravestones in the cemeteries at his own expense. Most of the book's print run was destroyed by the Nazis in Vienna. It would be welcome if a new edition could be published, which, among other things, could provide a wealth of inspiration for Jewish arts and crafts. The people of Bukovina will remember that Ing. Dawidowicz created chandeliers and grilles for the lodge house in Czernowitz based on motifs from Diamant's book. M. Seidman”

Jewish Cemeteries, Synagogues, and Mass Grave Sites in Ukraine

Wikipedia: Samuel D. Gruber is an American art and architectural historian and historic preservationist. He has written extensively on the architecture of the synagogue and is an expert and activist in the documentation, protection and preservation of historic Jewish sites and monuments. He was born in Norristown, Pennsylvania and lives in Syracuse, New York. […] In the decade and a half following the fall of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe (1990-2005), Gruber organized and supervised for the World Monuments Fund and the U.S. Commission more than a dozen countrywide surveys of cultural heritage sites of significance to religious and ethnic minorities. These identified, mostly for the first time, thousands of previously unrecognized and undocumented synagogues, churches, mosques, cemeteries and Holocaust-related sites, almost all of which were visited and by survey teams that described their condition. These projects included full or partial surveys of Jewish sites in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, The Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Ukraine; Roma sites in Poland; Old Believers sites in Lithuania; and Protestant Christian and Muslim sites in Bulgaria.

Courtesy: U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad

Pharus Map Czernowitz 1913 • Pharus Plan Czernowitz 1913

Czernowitz Pharus Map. Bukowinaer Vereinsdruckerei commissioned an overview map of Czernowitz from the Pharus Printing House in Berlin. The map goes on sale at the extremely low price of 1 [Austro-Hungarian] Krone. It is available at all book stores [and of course for free download at Edgar Hauster's Czernowitz Book Corner].

Bukowinaer Nachrichten, 19. Januar 1913

Please check the bilingual (German/Romanian) version of this map - inculding street finder - at: Internet Portal of the dtmb Project

Jewish Cemetery of Chernivtsi

Publication was made in the framework of EVS project of Karolina Koziura, organized by ‘SVIT-Ukraine’ and ‘One World Association’ in cooperation with Christian Herrmann, ‘Chernivtsi Museum of Bukovinian Jewish History and Culture’, municipality and Jewish community of Chernivtsi, ‘The Czernowitz Jewish Cemetery Restoration Organization’ (CJCRO) and the Faculty of Jewish Culture and History, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin.

GPS: N 048°17′36.4 E 025°57′29.6 • AREA: 115,847 sq m = 11.60 ha

Courtesy: Karolina Koziura at ACADEMIA • ESJF European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative

Mykhailivka: Camp to Village

Yahad-In Unum: "Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, a Romanian-Jewish poet, was born in 1924 in Czernowitz in Romania, present-day Chernivtsi, Ukraine to a Jewish family. In [1941], upon the German occupation of the region, her family was forced to move to the city’s ghetto. The following year, they were deported to the labor camp of Michailowka in Ukraine, a site where Yahad has conducted research and where Selma ultimately perished after contracting typhus. Decades after her death, her collection of poems describing beauty found amidst a landscape of death were discovered and published. Her poems speak to the notion of creative resistance in the Holocaust—the idea that the spirit can rebel through art. In her last letter to a friend from the Michailowka camp, Selma still wrote of how art could be used to comprehend her experience: 'I have been here less than three months and I imagine that I will surely go out of my mind. Especially in these unspeakably bright and white nights that overflow with longing. Sing sometimes, late at night, when you are alone: Poljushka. Perhaps you will understand my frame of mind…Of course, one bears it anyway. One endures, although one things again and again: Now, now it is too much.' (Harvest of Blossoms: Poems from a Life Cut Short)"

Courtesy: Yahad-In Unum

Schematism and Statistics • Schematismus und Statistik

Very large file, please allow adequate time for downloading!

David Levine: "I wanted to share with the group [Gesher Galicia] a resource which might be of interest. [...] The reason for sharing is that it is a very interesting historical and biographical resource for understanding the agricultural economy that our ancestors lived in and the people who worked and owned in it. The book lists not only the estates of the nobility but also those of smaller owners. The gazetteer lists the names of the owners as well as the people who worked in the management of the estates. It is a combination of geographical, biographical and agricultural information all of which is of interest from a genealogical context point of view. As Galicia [Bukovina] was in the Habsburg empire, Jews were far more free to participate in the agricultural economy. The names of some of the owners and those working on the estates are clearly Jewish. I got the book on inter-library loan as microfilm from University of Illinois and spent the day at the main San Francisco Public Library scanning each of the 750+ pages. As such the scans are pictures not OCR text that can be searched (sorry). […] What makes these easy to approach for research is that there are thorough indexes that start for

• Besitzer (owner name) on PDF page 690
• Beamten (officials who work on the estate) on PDF page 718
• Pächter (tenants/lessee names) on PDF page 727

The gazetteer is alphabetical by owner name. The list of estates are ordered by:
   
Galicia [PDF page 4]

same as below

Bukowina [PDF page 654]

Fideikommiss und Allodial (Landtäefliche) Güter
(entailed and landed estates) by name of owner

a) Weltliche (secular)
b) Geistliche (spiritual/church owned)
c) Stiftungsgüter (foundation/monastery owned)

d) Staats, Landes- und Gemeindegüter (state, province and community estates)

[...]

Happy to answer any questions."

David Levine
davidelevine@gmail.com
San Francisco, CA

"He spoke Yiddish like a Jew": Neighbors' Contribution to the Mass Killing of Jews in Northern Bukovina and Bessasrabia, July 1941

Dr. Simon Geissbühler (Romania and the Holocaust: Events Contexts Aftermath, ibidem, 2016): Holocaust memory in Romania as well as in those areas controlled by Romania during the Second World War which are now part of Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova is fragile, fragmented, and often guided by a semi-passive attitude of wanting-not-to-know. […] A big gap exists between public knowledge about the Holocaust and scholarly research. Large parts of the Romanian population as well as people now living in those places where atrocities were perpetrated by Romanians do not want to know. Most traces of Jewish life before the Holocaust and of the Holocaust itself have been neglected or even erased. Jewish cemeteries in Northern Bukovina, southwestern Ukraine, and the Republic of Moldova are often in a state of neglect. Very few synagogues still exist, and most have long since been destroyed or converted for other purposes. Mass graves are difficult to locate and most often not even recorded on maps. There are only very few and no new Jewish or Holocaust museums in these regions. […] There are some positive countertrends, however, but it is too early to speak about a strong wind of change when it comes to Holocaust memory in present-day Romania.

Courtesy: Oxford Academic Press • Holocaust and Genocide Studies