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

A Short History of the Jews from Radautz • O scurtă istorie a evreilor din Rădăuți

Daniel Hrenciuc: The Mosaic community of Rădăuți is among the oldest and most representative in Historical Bukovina. It was established in a similar manner to all other Jewish communities, such as the ones in Chernivtsi, Suceava, Siret, Gura Humorului, Câmpulung Moldovenesc or Vatra Dornei. The Jewish community’s dynamic role in the economy was appreciated and acknowledged by the local authorities. At the same time, Habsburg authorities wanted to colonize Bukovina and develop its economic, industrial and commercial potential.

Courtesy: Bondy Stenzler

Rumänien und der Holocaust • Romania and the Holocaust

Mariana Hausleitner: "During the 1990s, some Romanian politicians and journalists demanded that Ion Antonescu, the 'State Leader' from 1940 to 1944, should be rehabilitated. Antonescu had been executed as a war criminal in 1946. Now, some historians were claiming that in 1942, he had not turned over Romania’s Jews to the SS. Yet previously, tens of thousands of Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina had been killed after he had ordered them to be deported. During the Romanian occupation of Transnistria, over a hundred thousand Ukrainian Jews had been murdered. Serious academic research into these violent excesses did not begin in Romania until after 2005."

Courtesy: Osteuropa • Prof. Dr. Mariana Hausleitner

Bukovina Under Austrian Administration 1775-1875 • Die Bukowina unter österreichischer Verwaltung 1775-1875

Hieronymus Franciscus van Drunen ["A Sanguine Bunch" • Regional Identification in Habsburg Bukovina, 1774-1919]: Writings with an Ideological Agenda. By stating 'We only wanted to highlight part of the successes and the apparent run of events through facts, which in turn explain the gratitude with which the commemorating population these days solemnises the centenary of the country's linkage with Austria', legal historian Hermann Ignaz Bidermann completed his 'Bukovina under Austrian Administration 1775- 1875'. By 1875, many of the conditions in Bukovina described by the first Austrian envoys had changed dramatically: the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions had accelerated the process of Bukovinian disengagement from Galicia and had eventually led to independent crownland status. Immigration had continued and urbanisation had taken root, especially in Czernowitz and to a lesser extent in the towns of Suczawa and Radautz. National consciousness among the elites of Romanian and Ruthenian speakers was on the rise and was to be enhanced by the founding of the Franz Joseph University in 1875. […] Not only were the publications by Bidermann and [Adolf] Ficker ['Centenary of the Unification of Bukovina with Austria' • 'Hundertjahrfeier der Vereinigung der Bukowina mit Österreich'] the first works for a larger audience dealing with Austrian Bukovina, they also specifically aimed at glorifying the Austrian achievements on the occasion of an anniversary which in the eyes of Romanian nationalists was no reason to celebrate to begin with. […]

Courtesy: GoogleBooks

A Journey Through the Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter • From Antiquity to 1914

UJE: This exhibition takes us on a journey through the thousand-year encounter of Jews and Ukrainians, their experience under changing political regimes and interactions with other peoples. It is a story of long periods of normal co-existence and cultural cross-fertilization, and of times of crisis.

Lecture: UJE Co-Director Alti Rodal, "Excerpts from a 2001 Interview with Yosef Burg", International Commemorative Conference of Yiddish Language and Culture, Chernivtsi, 7 August 2018.

Courtesy: Ukrainian Jewish Encounter

The "Jewish Question" in Romanian Military Documents. 1941-1944 • "Chestiunea evreiască" în documente militare române. 1941-1944

Michelle Mazel: "It is doubtful whether there would have been a significant change in Rumanian public opinion had it not been for the country's earnest wish to join the European Union. Because of their EU candidacy the country's rulers reluctantly came to the conclusion that Rumania would have to make a more thorough investigation of what happened to the Jews and even open its archives to foreign researchers. …"

Courtesy: Elena Dagan on Academia

Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine

UNC PRESS: "On 16 July 1941, Adolf Hitler convened top Nazi leaders at his headquarters in East Prussia to dictate how they would rule the newly occupied eastern territories. Ukraine, the 'jewel' in the Nazi empire, would become a German colony administered by Heinrich Himmler's SS and police, Hermann Göring's economic plunderers, and a host of other satraps. Focusing on the Zhytomyr region and weaving together official German wartime records, diaries, memoirs, and personal interviews, Wendy Lower provides the most complete assessment available of German colonization and the Holocaust in Ukraine. Midlevel 'managers,' Lower demonstrates, played major roles in mass murder, and locals willingly participated in violence and theft. Lower puts names and faces to local perpetrators, bystanders, beneficiaries, as well as resisters. She argues that Nazi actions in the region evolved from imperial arrogance and ambition; hatred of Jews, Slavs, and Communists; careerism and pragmatism; greed and fear. In her analysis of the murderous implementation of Nazi 'race' and population policy in Zhytomyr, Lower shifts scholarly attention from Germany itself to the eastern outposts of the Reich, where the regime truly revealed its core beliefs, aims, and practices."

Courtesy: The University of North Carolina Press

Nostallergie - Die Czernowitzer Inkongruenzkompensationskompetenz • Nostallergy - The Czernowitzer Incongruence Compensation Competence

Martin A. Hainz: Czernowitz in retrospect: urban legend and legend of the urban. This was said to be exemplary there, as well as an ironically fractured enlightenment and, finally, multiculturalism. The most diverse ethnic groups, conceptions of life and speech communities lived together in harmony. Who says that and why? Is this to be the first story that was told sine ira et studio? This is to be answered in this paper as well as the question what Czernowitz has been. In order to do so, the author draws upon diverse readings such as Paul Celan‘s.

Courtesy: Center for Area Studies • Freie Universität Berlin / Kakanien Revisited

Obsesia incertitudinii • The Obsession of Uncertainty

New York Insititute for the Humanities (NYIH): Norman Manea is a Romanian writer, living in New York City. His writing comprises novels, essays, short prose and his topic is, mainly, the individual destiny in extreme situations (holocaust, communist dictatorship, exile). Norman Manea received important Romanian, American and European cultural distinctions. He is the Laureate of the Romanian National Prize for Literature and is the first Romanian writer to be granted the American McArthur Fellowship, as well as the Italian international Nonino Prize, the French Medicis Etranger Prize, the German Nelly Sachs Prize, the Spanish Palau Fabre Prize. Member of the Berlin Academy of Art and of the Royal Society of Literature in Great Britain, he was decorated by the French government with the title of Commandeur dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He seems to be the Romanian writer mostly honored ever, outside his homeland. At the celebration of his 75th birthday at Bard College and at the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York writers, scholars and publishers from several countries debated and praised the literary originality and the moral core of his creativity. At this occasion, was published in Romanian and English the festive book In Honorem Norman Manea: Obsesia Incertitudinii - The Obsession Of Uncertainty, Polirom, Romania, 2011, with important literary contributors (Philip Roth, Claudio Magris, Antonio Tabucchi, Antonio Munoz Molina etc.). Numerous reviews, studies, essays on his work can be found in the main newspapers and cultural magazines in the USA, Romania, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and other countries were his writing was published. The Polirom Publishing House in Romania started a series of 25 volumes of his work, from which 17 have already appeared. The Swedish press in 2012 and the French press in 2013 reiterated Norman Manea's status as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature. In 2013, the Romanian Writers Union proposed his name as a Nobel candidate, as did – in previous years – the Romanian and Swedish PEN and several scholars in Romanian literature. In 2014, the Romanian PEN reiterated this proposal.



Courtesy: Polirom

Bucureștii pe care nu i-am cunoscut • Bucharest Uncovered

 

esa Earth Watching: Bucharest is the capital municipality, cultural, industrial, and financial centre of Romania. It is the largest city in Romania and a primate city, located in the southeast of the country, lies on the banks of the Dâmbovița River, less than 70 km north of the Danube River. Bucharest was first mentioned in documents in 1459. It became the capital of Romania in 1862 and is the centre of Romanian media, culture and art. Its architecture is a mix of historical (neo-classical), interbellum (Bauhaus and art deco), communist-era and modern. In the period between the two World Wars, the city's elegant architecture and the sophistication of its elite earned Bucharest the nickname of "Little Paris". Although buildings and districts in the historic city centre were heavily damaged or destroyed by war, earthquakes, and above all Nicolae Ceauşescu's program of systematisation, many survived. In recent years, the city has been experiencing an economic and cultural boom.

Czernowitz: Jüdische Stadt deutscher Sprache • Jewish City of German Language

Friedrich J. Ortwein: "Up until now, I was profoundly convinced, that the love and the devotion of the citizens of Cologne to their home town, the antique CCAA (Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium), one of the Daughters of Rome and free imperial city, cannot be exceeded by anybody in the world. But during the travel preparations for our journey to Galicia and Bukovina, when I came across the website of the Jews expelled from CZERNOWITZ, I had to reverse: The children and grandchildren of Czernowitzers, together with a few Holocaust survivors, have created a website containing a huge data volume and so they emphasize in an unique and inimitable way their love for the home country of their ancestors.

Forum members from all over the world, from the Americas, from Australia and South Africa, from Israel and Europe analyze, comment and swap ideas on events, research their genealogical roots, discuss and value rediscovered archival materials, enjoy old and new photos, exchange holiday and birthday wishes and all this happens in English with embedded German, Yiddish and Hebrew particles."

Courtesy: Friedrich J. Ortwein

Forced and Slave Labor in Nazi-Dominated Europe

Paul A. Shapiro, USHMM: "Civilians, including concentration camp prisoners, deportees, foreign nationals, and Jews, as well as prisoners of war were forced into the sprawling forced and slave labor system that encompassed Europe and supported the war efforts of the Nazi regime and Germany’s Axis allies. Forced and slave labor was used in road-building and defense works; the chemical, construction, metal, mining, and munitions industries; in agriculture; at installations working at the highest levels of technology; and to perform menial tasks. Such labor was integral to concentration camps and their sub-camps, farms, ghettos, labor battalions, church institutions, prisoner-of-war camps, and private industries in Germany, other Axis countries, and Axis-occupied territories east and west. […] The uniquely compelling nature of survivor memory was underscored in William Rosenzweig’s account of his deportation east from his native Czernowitz, Romania, and his slave labor experiences in Romanian-occupied Transnistria. The final session 'Forced and Slave Labor Across Europe', began with Andrej Angrick’s (institution, place) discussion of the use of SS-assigned slave labor in the construction of DG-IV, a main transit road built by the Germans and essential to their assault on Stalingrad and the Caucasus."

Courtesy: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Transfer of Jews from Transnistria to Turkey

 

USHMM: "Through Executive Order 9417 on January 22, 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the War Refugee Board (WRB), tasked with the 'immediate rescue and relief of the Jews of Europe and other victims of enemy persecution.' An independent government agency under the Executive branch, the WRB operated until President Harry S. Truman closed it with Executive Order 9614 on September 15, 1945. After World War II, the WRB's first director, John Pehle, described the board as 'little and late' in comparison to the enormity of the Holocaust. In the War Refugee Board’s final report, the staff estimated that they saved tens of thousands of lives, and aided hundreds of thousands more."

This archival treasure brings into the light of day the correspondence between the

• International Commitee of the Red Cross, Geneva/Switzerland
• War Refugee Board, Washington/USA
• American Embassy, Ankara/Turkey
• Secretary of State, Washington/USA
• Dr. Joseph J. Schwartz, Executive Council of the Joint Distribution Committee, Lisbon/Portugal
• World Jewish Congress, New York/USA

including these two most comprehensive reports:

Travel Report by Charles Kolb, International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) representative stationed in Romania, on his journey to Transnistria between December 11-21, 1943.

Report of the Situation of the Jews in Transnistria, January - April 1943, by the World Jewish Congress.

Courtesy: Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum

Athene Palace Bucharest • Hitler's 'New Order' Comes to Rumania

 

The University of Chicago Press: "On the day that Paris fell to the Nazis, R. G. Waldeck was checking into the swankiest hotel in Bucharest, the Athene Palace. A cosmopolitan center during the war, the hotel was populated by Italian and German oilmen hoping to secure new business opportunities in Romania, international spies cloaked in fake identities, and Nazi officers whom Waldeck discovered to be intelligent but utterly bloodless. A German Jew and a reporter for Newsweek, Waldeck became a close observer of the Nazi invasion. As King Carol first tried to placate the Nazis, then abdicated the throne in favor of his son, Waldeck was dressing for dinners with diplomats and cozying up to Nazi officers to get insight and information. From her unique vantage, she watched as Romania, a country with a pro-totalitarian elite and a deep strain of anti-Semitism, suffered civil unrest, a German invasion, and an earthquake, before turning against the Nazis. A striking combination of social intimacy and disinterest political analysis, Athene Palace evokes the elegance and excitement of the dynamic international community in Bucharest before the world had comes to grips with the horrors of war and genocide. Waldeck’s account strikingly presents the finely wrought surface of dinner parties, polite discourse, and charisma, while recognizing the undercurrents of violence and greed that ran through the denizens of Athene Palace."

Read in addition the new foreword by Robert D. Kaplan to ATHENE PALACE: Hitler’s “New Order” Comes to Rumania by R. G. Waldeck, published by The University of Chicago Press!