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.
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
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
