Europe’s Jewish heritage gets online home

Jewish Heritage Europe is a project of the Rothschild Foundation (Hanadiv) Europe and aims to serve as an online clearinghouse for all news, information and contacts about Jewish heritage from as far east as Turkey and Russia to the UK and Portugal. The focus will be on built Jewish heritage, meaning synagogues, cemeteries and other architectural remnants of Jewish culture that attest to a presence on the continent stretching back to Antiquity.

The project’s launch was held in Prague on the first night of Hanukkah 2011. Ruth Ellen Gruber, who heads the site, told Czech Position that Prague was selected for a very particular reason.

“One of the reasons we wanted to launch it in Prague was that the Czech Republic has had such success in handling of its Jewish heritage sites. They have models I think that could be followed,” Gruber said. “They developed a strategy very early on of what to do with the buildings they received back, how to work in partnerships with local civic initiatives, how to fundraise, and so on.”

Gruber maintains that there were many factors that contributed to the strong results of Czech Jewish organizations in protecting its heritage, including the positive climate in the country and the significant experience already gained by researchers in the Jewish Museum.

Covering 48 different European countries from the largest to territories such as Andorra and Vatican City, Gruber sees vast differences in results among them. “They [Czech Republic] really devised a strategy that in many other countries unfortunately hasn’t been realized.”

One of the key obstacles in protecting and acknowledging Jewish heritage sites in Europe was the existence of communist regimes that suppressed Jewish culture altogether. Gruber notes that more Czech and Slovak synagogues were destroyed during communism than during German occupation in World War II. Beyond that, the few people who attempted to research the remaining sites were not only discourage from doing so but became the focus of suspicion as they tried to photograph abandoned synagogues and overgrown cemeteries. (via Czech Position)