[Cz-L] Transdniester: Routes of Disappearance and Rediscovery

I thought the list might find this article of interest.

Randy Fishbein, Ph.D.

[Randy... posts to this list need to be in Plain Text mode not Rich Text
or HTML - we have to edit out the html before it can be distributed --the moderators]

Routes of Disappearance and Rediscovery
By Ky Krauthamer + February 3rd, 2011

The photos, especially, are lovely and evocative testimony to what is left
of the synagogues and Jewish cemeteries of northern Moldavia, a region
embracing parts of modern Romania, Moldova, and Ukraine.

A fascinating book arrived at our office the other day. Like Shells on a
Shore is a collection of photographs and short texts by a Swiss diplomat,
Simon Geissbuehler. The photos, especially, are lovely and evocative
testimony to what is left of the synagogues and Jewish cemeteries of
northern Moldavia, a region embracing parts of modern Romania, Moldova, and
Ukraine. Here, in the southern part of the Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi world,
Jews came into contact with Turks, Romanians, and Sephardic Jews from
further south and east. My interest in this part of Europe was sparked in
the 1980s when I read Gregor von Rezzori's fine novel Memoirs of an
Anti-Semite, with its finely nuanced nostalgia for the old ways of life in
the city of Czernowitz/Chernivtsi in Bukovina/Ukraine. There are many photo
books on Eastern Europe's decaying and half-forgotten Jewish cultural
heritage, but Geissbuehler's non-professional shots are memorable for their
mournfulness and solemnity. Some of these structures and cemeteries are of
great cultural value, and yet many are hardly known, such as the cemetery in
Vadul-Rascov, Moldova, pictured on this page.

A recent exhibition comes at this question of the cultural heritage of
half-forgotten and semi-alien minorities from a different angle. For "Routes
of Disappearance: Jewish and Roma Memory of Transnistria," researchers Jozef
Markiewicz (Warsaw), Anna Abakunova and Georgii Abakunov (Dnipropetrovsk),
and Romani activist Zemfira Kondur of Kyiv gathered oral histories from
Jewish and Romani present or former residents of Transnistria, or
Transdniester - the eastern part of the territory Geissbuehler scoured for
Jewish sites. Photos and documentary evidence of their lives and of the
devastation that came down on both the Jewish and Romani communities during
World War II - a tragedy often marginalized by the people who live in those
areas now - were displayed in Chisinau, and the organizers planned to bring
it to several cities in Ukraine and Poland.

I applaud this effort to link together the memories of two "stateless
nations," but wonder how much empathy each has for the other. The positive
side, from the standpoint of reconciliation and rebuilding, is that Romani
suffering during the war is now often mentioned in the same breath with the
Jewish Holocaust. I hope this exhibition can travel further and the oral
histories be published in book form, and that Geissbuehler's book finds a
major publisher.

http://eastofcenter.tol.org/2011/02/routes-of-disappearance-and-rediscovery/

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Received on 2011-04-14 20:50:56