Local Jewish Research Articles

From Shulhoyf to Montparnasse: Cultural Collage in Moshé Vorobeichic's Photography Book The Ghetto Lane in Wilna (1931)

This article discusses the artistic genesis of the first avantgarde photography book in Lithuanian art history, The Ghetto Lane in Wilna (1931) by Moshé Vorobeichic-Moï Ver (Moshe Raviv, 1904–1995), and aims to conduct the first in-depth reconstruction of Vorobeichic’s early biographical and creative period in Vilnius in the 1920s in the local Jewish and multicultural milieu. The research is based on archival materials from Lithuanian state archives and the Raviv family archives in Israel. Vorobeichic, who was born in 1904 in Zaskavichy (currently in Belarus), made his artistic debut in Vilnius in 1923, and studied at the Faculty of Fine Art at Stephen Bathory University from 1923 to 1925. He continued his art studies at the Bauhaus school in Dessau (1927 to 1929) and, from 1929 in Paris at the École Technique de Photographie et de Cinématographie. From 1930 onwards, the photographer used the artistic pseudonym Moï Ver, under which his avant-garde photography book Paris, hailed as a masterpiece of the genre, was published by Editions Jeanne Walter in 1931. During the same period, Vorobeichic participated in Jewish cultural life in Vilnius, and was involved in the early stages of the formation of Yung Vilne, the acclaimed literary and artistic group of interwar Yiddish Modernism. The article aims to identify the cultural contexts in which Moï Ver’s artistic world-view and avant-garde style started to develop. The reconstruction of these contexts makes it possible to identify new semantic aspects in his avant-garde photography book The Ghetto Lane in Wilna, and to rethink its artistic concept. In this way, the cross-cultural semantics of Moï Ver’s photographic collages of Jewish Vilnius will emerge.

The Central Synagogue of Nazareth Illit and its architectural dialogue with Nazareth\u2019s Basilica of the Annunciation

The hometown of Jesus, Nazareth, is an international center of Christian pilgrimage that has capitalized on showcasing its sacred sites. Architect Antonio Barluzzi was commissioned to design Nazareth’s modern Basilica of the Annunciation in 1954, and a cornerstone for the project was laid in a well-attended ceremony. It seems that the establishment of the modern church was the catalyst for the eagerness with which the Israeli authorities approached establishing a Jewish monument in the region. In 1957, a design process for the Central Synagogue in Nazareth Illit (subsequently renamed Nof HaGalil) began, with the aim of proudly competing with the churches and mosques in the Nazareth region. Both the basilica and the synagogue were erected by Israeli construction firm Solel Boneh and were inaugurated in 1968 and 1969, respectively. This article examines the impact of the inception, establishment and building of Nazareth’s Basilica of the Annunciation on the drive to strengthen Jewish presence in the Nazareth region, which in turn stood behind the construction of the Nazareth Illit synagogue. This research is based on a comparative investigation of the histories of both structures, including early design proposals, architecture, and the religious artworks therein. This comparative investigation reveals the influence of the basilica on the synagogue and the shared aspects of their design and execution. While existing literature dedicated to the Central Synagogue in Nazareth Illit has focused on its significance and meaning as an Israeli architectural landmark, this article presents a new perspective, examining how a modern architectural trend was used as an agent in the struggle between local Jewish and Christian monumental dominance. It also contributes to the literature by shedding light on a heretofore overlooked quest for an appropriate architectural style for religious buildings in the Land of Israel during the mid-twentieth century.

Polityczna i pedagogiczna aktywność Janusza Jędrzejewicza na emigracji (1939–1951)

Polityczna i pedagogiczna aktywność Janusza Jędrzejewicza na emigracji (1939–1951)

Reportage: Small exhibits, major steps: four post-Soviet Jewish museums

The small-scale Jewish museums in Chișinău (Moldova), Odessa (Ukraine), Lviv (Ukraine), and Minsk (Belarus) narrate the history of once flourishing Jewish communities, and document their disappearance. Their permanent collections, which consist of the private belongings that emigrating Jewish families gave them in the early 1990s, are the basis for their exhibitions. These museums opened in the early 2000s under the auspices of local Jewish cultural and charitable organizations. They are not state museums and lack a solid financial foundation and stable professional curatorial team. Much depends on the personal vision of their directors. Despite both limited exhibition space and locations not frequented by tourists, these museums are important agents of memory and identity for local Jewish and non-Jewish audiences, as well as for international visitors.

The Qubbat al-Ṣaḫrah in the 12th Century

This paper investigates the reasons for the unexpected importance acquired by theQubbat al-Ṣaḫrahin Crusader Jerusalem and its relationship to the Basilica of the Holy Sepulcher. It will be argued that Crusader pilgrims regarded theQubbat al-Ṣaḫrahas the eschatological Temple or Solomon’s Temple because of their knowledge of the Scriptures and local Jewish and Islamic traditions regarding the Temple Mount/ḥaram al-šarīf. Consequently, the Crusader rulers’ adaptation of theQubbat al-Ṣaḫrahas the church of theTemplum Dominiand its identification as Herod’s Temple will be explained as a reaction to these interpretations, which risked re-establishing the pre-Christian centrality of the Temple, thus jeopardizing the supremacy of the Basilica of the Holy Sepulcher.

The Third Reich at War (review)

Reviewed by: The Third Reich at War Peter Mansoor The Third Reich at War, by Richard J. Evans. New York: Penguin Press, 2009. 926 pp. $40.00. The Third Reich at War is the final segment in Richard Evan's excellent three-volume history of Nazi Germany. The author, the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, combines narrative history with first-person accounts to provide a holistic description of what life was like under Nazi rule. The Third Reich at War is not a comprehensive history of World War II in Europe. Rather, Evans focuses on key turning points: the conquest of Poland, the fall of France, and the Battle of Britain in the first year of conflict; the battles of Moscow and Stalingrad on the Eastern Front; and the strategic bombing of German cities. He provides a more complete treatment of the mass murder along racial and ideological lines of millions of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, homosexuals, mentally and physically handicapped, and others deemed unfit to live in the new order of the Third Reich. Extensively researched from published German and English primary and secondary sources and exceptionally well written, The Third Reich at War is an excellent account of the Third Reich during its final years that belongs on the bookshelves of all serious students of World War II. Evans provides just enough narrative of military operations to keep the reader engaged as to the broad sweep of events. He is at his best when describing the impact of occupation on the peoples and areas conquered by the Wehrmacht. In Poland in the last quarter of 1939, for instance, we learn that the Germans murdered 65,000 Poles and Jews, a down payment on the genocide to come. Poland was a model for what would happen in the East in Hitler's new order—its population enslaved, its territory either annexed or stripped of usable resources, and those deemed racially unfit summarily shot or hanged. By 1943 the Germans had ethnically cleansed millions of Poles and others to make room for German settlers, had suppressed local culture and learning, and had Germanicized the language in preparation for the area's eventual incorporation into the greater Reich. [End Page 187] The Nazi order made a sham of the rule of law in Europe. Heralded as a functional, disciplined, efficient governing system, Hitler's Germany was instead riven with criminality and corruption. In every society touched by Nazi tyranny, years of antisemitic and racial propaganda encouraged German soldiers to treat the local Jewish and Slavic populations with contempt and brutality. Nazi policy mandated the concentration of Jews into ghettoes in Poland, where hundreds of thousands died due to disease and starvation even before the final solution sent the remainder to death camps. Hitler's ideology drove his actions, to include the planning for the most important campaign of the war—Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. The German people needed lebensraum—living space—and the German economy needed the resources of Eastern Europe. The Red Army, in Hitler's view leaderless since the purges of the 1930s (as proven by its disastrous performance in the Russo-Finish War in 1939-1940) and composed of subhuman Slavic soldiers, would quickly fold. Since the conquest would take no more than a single campaign season, the prospect of a two-front war did not factor into German strategic thinking. The vaunted German General Staff posed no objections. The treatment meted out to the Poles was now replicated on a much larger scale in the Soviet Union. German troops summarily shot political commissars (a loosely defined term), starved prisoners, and subjected Jews to a massive genocidal campaign instigated by SS Einsatzgruppen and aided and abetted by the regular army. Given Nazi ideology and propaganda, it was a small step from the mass killings of Jews in the East to a more organized system of mass murder in killing centers in Poland. Although Hitler never signed a written order mandating the extermination of the Jews, his oral pronouncements were clear enough and provided all the guidance his subordinates needed to initiate the Holocaust. As the war dragged on, Hitler's mismanagement of...

Inventing Great Neck: Jewish Identity and the American Dream (review)

Inventing Great Neck: Jewish Identity and the American Dream, by Judith S. Goldstein. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006. 205 pp. $24.95. In this popular history, Judith Goldstein traces the development of Great Neck, New York, through an intimate look at the personalities and problems that shaped this suburban enclave. She pays particular attention to the evolution of Jewish and non-Jewish relations, the limits of tolerance and liberalism, and the effects of Jewish migration on suburbanization. Goldstein begins her study in the 1920s, when Great Neck first gained attention on the national scene. Howevet, its renown stemmed not from its Jewish population, which then only numbered around two hundred families, but from its image as an affluent haven for New York City's businessmen and artistic elite, with such notables as Pulitzer's World editor Herbert Bayard Swope, Groucho Marx, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who memorialized the area in his famous novel, The Great Gatsby. With the exception of an old guat d Protestant elite, as labeled by Goldstein, who maintained their own small social network, the wealthy and notable Jewish and non-Jewish inhabitants of Great Neck mingled socially with relative ease. This, according to Goldstein, set Great Neck apart from other suburbs, as it conducted a newsocial experiment, which tried to push aside the traditional barriers built on social separation (p. 22). Since most of the Jewish and non-Jewish residents of Great Neck had only recently moved into the area, few traditional social barriers for mixing stood in their way. Indeed, many of the guests frequenting parties such as those at the Swope residence knew one another from business ventures in New York City, only sixteen miles west, or through the introduction of a friend acquainted with those attending. Here, however, not much mention is made of the local Jewish and non-Jewish residents who would not have been issued an invitation to these upscale gatherings. Focus on the general population of the suburb appeared when Great Neck's reputation as a celebrity playground and tolerant environment towards minorities encouraged other Jews to settle in the area. Many Jews had attained a higher level of social mobility by the 1920s and 1930s, and this brought them to the hospitable suburban environment. They saw their chance to move to Great Neck and settle there as proof of their arrival into the middle class. While not all non-Jewish residents welcomed the influx of Jews into the neighborhood, the lack of formal residential restriction encouraged further growth. Proving the extent of their acculturation provided Jews the best answer for how to maintain positive relations with Great Neck's non-Jewish population, which still constituted the majority of the town's inhabitants. Those Jews who moved to Great Neck during this period successfully immersed themselves in the civic activities of the larger population while simultaneously creating new venues for Jewish communal life in a place where none previously existed. In 1930, at the beginning of the Depression, Temple Beth-El, a Reform congregation and the first synagogue in the area, opened its doors, displaying architectural details which blended perfectly with the tone of much of Great Neck's public architecture (p. 69). …

Michael Alan Casson

Educated at Manchester Grammar School, where his sprinting earned him the name “twinkle toes,” and Manchester University, where he was selected for a BSc in physiology, Mike spent time in...