Prague/Vienna

 Prague. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

I'm slow: still processing my recent visits to Warsaw, Piotrkow Trybunalski and Krakow (and Festival of Jewish Culture.) Meanwhile, here are links to my two latest columns for Centropa.org -- on Jewish Prague and Jewish Vienna.

Prague 

by Ruth Ellen Gruber 

PRAGUE -- Lying between the Vltava River and the Old Town Square, Prague's medieval "Jewish Town," Josefov, is one of the most popular attractions in a magical "golden city" that draws millions of tourists a year. Here, amid historic synagogues, the Old Jewish Cemetery, the Jewish Town Hall and other major sights, is the Ground Zero of Jewish Prague: the stomping ground for heroes and villains and the evocative background setting for a host of old legends, not to mention the cradle of present-day Jewish life. Here, Jewish heritage and legacy are cultivated and exploited as an integral part of the ancient city. At peak season, tourists swarm through the district, making it sometimes difficult to navigate the cobbled streets, and souvenir hawkers sell everything from miniature golems to embroidered kippot.

I imagine the Jewish presence in Prague as a series of concentric circles centered on this medieval ghetto area and then expanding outward, like widening ripples of water, to the edge of the city and beyond. Physical sites, as well as Jewish memory and contemporary Jewish life, are concentrated in the innermost circle: there are a Jewish education center, kosher facilities and Jewish communal offices, and regular services take place in several venues. But there are many places of Jewish interest well away from the city center, too. These are much less visible and well off the beaten track of most visitors to the city, but they, too, form an integral part of the Jewish experience in Prague. The following itinerary will let you sample some of these outer circles of Jewish history and culture as well as the city's inner core.

The Inner Circle

Tourists aside, Prague's old Jewish quarter today bears very little resemblance to the dense welter of narrow alleys, tiny squares, dark passageways and crowded courtyards where generations of Jews were compelled to live from the Middle Ages to the mid-19th century, when the Habsburg monarchs granted them civil rights. After emancipation, many Jews moved out, and Jewish Town became a slum. An urban renewal project in the late 19th century swept away almost everything but a handful of synagogues and a few other historic sites, and the medieval ghetto was replaced by the handsome complex of buildings we see today. On the façade of the building at Maiselova 12, across from the Old-New Synagogue, you can see Jews symbolized by the star of David, money and stereotype profiles.

Jewish Town is still, though, where the city's main Jewish sights are concentrated. And if you can brave the crowds, you will see some of the finest and best preserved and presented Jewish heritage sites in Europe.
These include the 13th-century Old-New (or Alt-neu) Synagogue, the oldest synagogue in Europe still in use. Built about 1270, the compact Gothic building has a high peaked roof and distinctive brick gables. The twin-naved sanctuary features soaring Gothic vaulting and a central bimah enclosed by a late Gothic iron grille. Carvings of grape vines surround the Ark.

Across narrow Cervena alley is the High Synagogue, built in 1568, which, like the Old-New Synagogue, is today an active house of prayer and study. Right next door to the High Synagogue is the Jewish Town Hall (entrance at Maiselova 18), which still serves as the headquarters for Jewish community offices and activities. Built in the 1560s, the Jewish Town Hall is one of the landmarks of the Jewish quarter, with a distinctive tower and big clock with Hebrew letters, that seems to run backwards.

Prague's Jewish Museum occupies several historic synagogue buildings in the district. The museum was originally founded in 1906 to preserve items from the synagogues that were demolished in the urban renewal clearance of the old ghetto. Most of its collections, however, come from the more than 150 provincial Jewish communities in Bohemia and Moravia that were destroyed by the Nazis. The Nazis brought the loot to Prague, and even during World War II used the empty synagogues to exhibit precious relics of the people they sought to annihilate. The museum was run by the communist state after World War II, but it was returned to Jewish administration in 1994.

Read full story HERE

Vienna 

by Ruth Ellen Gruber 

Vienna looms large in Jewish history and memory. The imperial Habsburg capital was the vibrant hub of a vast, multi-national Empire that stretched across Europe and encompassed a colorful and sometimes contentious mix of peoples, languages, religions and local cultures.

Jews lived here for centuries. Surviving pendulum-swing periods of tragedy and triumph, prosperity and persecution, they made key contributions to the cultural, economic and intellectual development of the city.
Nineteenth and early 20th century Vienna in particular was home to some of Europe's most influential artists, authors, musicians and thinkers -- from the writers Joseph Roth, Arthur Schnitzler and Stephan Zweig, to the composers Arnold Schoenberg and Gustav Mahler, to the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Vienna was also the cradle of some of the icons of popular culture: the filmmaker Billy Wilder grew up in the city, and the novelist Vicki Baum, the author of Grand Hotel and other best-sellers, was born here and wrote about her Viennese childhood in her memoirs. "To be a Jew is a destiny," she once said.

The Holocaust swept this world away. But monuments, museums and other vestiges of this long and creative Jewish presence can be found in many parts of the city.

What's more, Vienna is home, now, too, to a new flowering of Jewish life and creativity, both religious and secular. Vibrant schools, synagogues and other Jewish centers bear living witness to a remarkable Jewish rebirth in the decades since the Shoah. And Jewish writers, artists, musicians and filmmakers are putting their stamp on contemporary culture.

Visitors to Vienna can get a taste of both worlds. Most Jewish historical sites and monuments, as well as most active synagogues and Jewish centers, are located in central parts of the city, embedded in a historic urban setting that conjures up the grandeur of the past amid the contemporary bustle of modern-day life.
The following itinerary highlights some of the most important (and most easily visited) Jewish sights, but still, alas, gives only a brief taste of the richness of Jewish experience in the city.

Read full story HERE

Vienna -- Secret Garden-like Hidden Jewish Cemetery

 Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

It's always a pleasure to come across new sights and experiences in places you think you know pretty well.... A case in point is the Jewish cemetery on Seegasse, in Vienna, which I visited for the first time on Friday. (Shame on me, I know, for never having gone there before...)

If you didn't know about it, you would walk right by.... the cemetery, the oldest preserved Jewish cemetery in Vienna, is entered by walking through the lobby of a modern municipal old age home at Seegasse 9, in Vienna's 9th district, a five minute walk from the Rossauerlaende U-Bahn stop. (This may seem a cruel juxtaposition, but from 1698 to 1934 this was the site of a Jewish hospital -- and also in Prague the Jewish community's state-of-the-art seniors' home looks out over the New Jewish Cemetery...)

Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

The Seegasse cemetery is believed to have been founded in 1540 -- the oldest legible stone dates from 1582 -- and it operated until 1783, when the Emperor Joseph II banned issued a decree banning burials inside what today is the "Gurtel" ring around inner Vienna. Many 17th and 18th century luminaries were buried here, including the financier and Court Jew Samuel Oppenheimer (who founded the Jewish hospital and restored the cemetery at the end of the 17th century) and Samson Wertheimer, who succeeded him as Court Jew.

Samson Wertheimer's tomb -- it's actually a mausoleum, and this is one end. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

 Tourists near Wertheimer's tomb. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

According to the guidebook "Jewish Vienna" published in 2004 by Mandelbaum Verlag, some of the few local Jews still living in Vienna in 1943 managed to rescue some of the tombstones, either burying them on the spot or transporting them to the Central Cemetery and burying them there.

In  the mid-1980s, after the discovery of these stones, the cemetery underwent a full restoration -- and the surviving stones were set up in their original places thanks to a map of the cemetery that had been made in 1912. Many of the stones are massive and feature elegant calligraphy, lengthy epitaphs and some vivid carving of Jewish symbols and floral and other decoration, similar to that on tombs in the Jewish cemetery in Mikulov, Czech Republic, and elsewhere in Moravia. Fragments that could not be put together were used to construct a memorial wall, similar to those that exist in other countries at restored cemeteries.

Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Vienna -- Michael Jackson and the Jewish Nose

In Vienna this weekend, I visited the Jewish Museum to see the exhibit "Typisch!" -- about Jewish and other ethnic stereotypes. The exhibition already has shown at the Jewish Museum in Berlin and at the Spertus Museum in Chicago. What should I find as one of the exhibits? Michael Jackson, who else....

So -- here's my latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column about the experience.....

Poster for Typical!," an exhibit at the Jewish Museum in Vienna that features a photo of Michael Jackson used to illustrate how the singer tried to crush stereotypes. (Ruth Ellen Gruber)

Ruthless Cosmopolitan: Michael Jackson and the Jewish nose

By Ruth Ellen Gruber - June 29, 2009

VIENNA (JTA) -- Amid all the noisy outpouring over Michael Jackson's sudden death, the last place I expected to find him was in a Jewish museum. But there he was, his pale, mask-like, surgically engineered image featured as part of an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in the Austrian capital.

Called "Typical! -- Cliches of Jews and Others," the exhibition deals with the use (and abuse) of ethnic stereotypes in popular culture. The exhibition, which runs until October, has been shown at the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the Spertus Museum in Chicago.

It was assembled long before Jackson died June 25 in Los Angeles.

In a life-size photograph from 2002, he is shown with lank black hair framing a long, square stubbly chin, pinched red mouth, huge made-up eyes and a tiny nose with distorted pointy tip.

The photo is used to illustrate how, for better or worse, the King of Pop attempted to destroy stereotypes and, literally, to cut himself away from the confines of physical definition.

Jackson's "surgical transformations mirrored back to the culture the blurring of boundaries demarcating adulthood, sex and even race," Guy Trebay wrote in The New York Times after Jackson's death.

The "Typical!" exhibition deals with stereotypes commonly used to categorize African Americans, Muslims, women, Native Americans and others.

But given that it is mounted at a Jewish museum, much of its focus is on stereotypes about Jews. The exhibition poster employs a few sketched strokes to conjure up some: corkscrew curls, a hat and a huge hooked nose.

Indeed, the multitude of variations on the (alleged) size and shape of the Jewish nose form a major theme.

"The paradigm for the 'typically Jewish' nose originated in the craniological studies of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach," an information panel informs. A German natural scientist who died in 1840, Blumenbach "claimed to have evidence that Jews had an especially prominent nasal bone."

Exhibit installations examine the misuse of this and other paradigms in "scientific" teaching, as well as the ways in which they became part of the vernacular shorthand that shapes the way we see others and ourselves.

A section called "the schnoz," for example, shows a collection of 19th century walking sticks whose handles are formed by exaggerated noses. The contemporary artist Dennis Kardon's installation "Jewish Noses” features dozens of larger-than-life-sized casts made from the noses of actual Jews to demonstrate the silliness of such nasal cliches. Also, a modern painting ironically comments on the love and success that are supposed to result if one has a nose job.

"I am often asked whether or not Jews have a 'Semitic' nose," reads an exhibition quote by the historian Sander Gilman, who has written extensively about Jewish stereotypes. "After 54 years of experience, I can only answer that every Jew I have ever met has a nose."

The inclusion of Jackson's picture in the mix highlighted the transformations his own nose infamously went through.

It also reminded me of a book I read some years ago, a vicious anti-Semitic satire called "The Operated Jew," that was written in 1893 by a German doctor named Oskar Panizza.

An attack on efforts by Jews to assimilate into mainstream society, the book is a creepy and extremely disturbing tale about how a Jew named Itzig Faitel Stern tries to rid himself physically of the stereotypical signs of his Jewishness and become a "modern" European.

Foreshadowing Jackson's experiences under the knife, Stern submits to radical procedures, including the straightening and bleaching of his hair, "Extreme Makeover"-style cosmetic surgery and a series of horrendous operations to straighten his bones. He even gets a full transfusion of "Christian blood."

"It is impossible for me to give the reader an account of all the garnishings, changes, injections and quackeries to which Itzig Faitel Stern submitted himself," the narrator states. "He experienced the most excruciating pain and showed great heroism so he could become the equivalent of an occidental human being."

In the end, it doesn't help. At his wedding to a Christian woman, all falls apart and Stern "reverts" to the ugliest anti-Semitic cliche of the Jew.

Panizza, an early exponent of Nazi-style racial anti-Semitism, set out to "prove" that Jews could never become part of the mainstream modern world, even if they physically attempted to change their skins.

It's not exactly clear what world Jackson was trying to become part of -- or leave -- with his surgeries and other transformations.

Artistically he was the ultimate crossover, winning fans of all colors, ages, religions, nationalities and sexual orientations all around the world. Over the years, though, he alienated some African Americans by his physical manipulation of identity and apparent ambivalence about his own blackness.

Death, though, appears to have brought Jackson back to his roots -- or in any case to a warm embrace by the African-American community.

“We want to celebrate this black man," the actor and singer Jamie Foxx said to cheers at the Black Entertainment Television Music Awards Sunday. "He belongs to us, and we shared him with everybody else.”

Foxx added, "It didn't matter what he looked like, it was all about what he sounded like. It didn't matter what his nose looked like -- I loved the old nose and the new nose."

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