[Cz-L]Jewish Galicia and Bukovina - Fieldwork Team Leaving for Ukraine

Enclosed is a press release issued by Jewish Galicia and Bukovina
(JGB), a Jerusalem-based association for the study and preservation of
Galician and Bukovinian heritage, about the upcoming fieldwork
expedition to Pidhaitsi, Ukraine. We are currently exploring the
option of adding volunteer researchers and laypersons to the fieldwork
team. If you are interested in joining such a team, please contact JGB
at JewishGalicia_at_gmail.com.

Learning and Preserving: Jewish Galicia and Bukovina Forming Team for
Documentation Research in Pidhaitsi, Ukraine, Summer 2011
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Galicia and Bukovina, two adjacent picturesque and serene regions in
East-Central Europe, hold a special place in the history of the Jewish
people. Throughout the generations, from the 13th century up until the
Holocaust, many Jewish communities lived and prospered there and
achieved cultural greatness and demographic might. The Jews of Galicia
and Bukovina contributed significantly to the shaping of Jewish
culture of Europe and beyond. Rabbis and philosophers, mystics and
preachers, writers and industrialists, politicians and painters,
actors and researchers- developed Jewish life in the small cities and
towns of Galicia and Bukovina that has created an entire rich and
multicolored civilization drawn from the traditional Jewish legacy and
the unprecedented encounter (both in scope and depth) with the Gentile
culture and Austrian, Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian surroundings.
This unique culture is now gone. It was completely destroyed during
the Holocaust and has been forgotten through the years of the Soviet
rule. The Jewish legacy of Galicia and Bukovina was disconnected from
the geographic area in which it developed and its few remains were
scattered among different organizations and institutions: Academia,
museums, yeshivas, and Hasidic dynasties in Israel and around the
world.
Returning the culture of Galician and Bukovinian Jewry to the modern
cultural discourse was the vision behind the initiative of the
nonprofit organization Jewish Galicia and Bukovina to send research
teams to the area. Groups of students from Ukrainian and Russian
universities, under the supervision of Israeli researchers from the
Hebrew University, have already gone to small towns in West Ukraine
including Ivano-Frankivsk (Stanislaw), Solotvin, and Nadworna, as part
of the two teams our NGO arranged during 2009 and 2010. A unique team
will be leaving in this coming summer- composed of students from the
Hesder Yeshiva "Siach Yitzhak" (Efrat) and students from Ben-Gurion
University along with students from the university of St. Petersburg.
This diverse team, which unites the dialogue between the religious
world and the academia, as well between the Western and Eastern
European cultures, correlates wonderfully with the uniqueness of the
Jewish culture of Galicia and Bukovina.
The team, in which 15 participants (8 from Israel and 7 from Russia)
will take part, will be working in one of the most important Jewish
sites in Galicia- the town of Pidhaitsi. More than 4000 Jews lived in
the town at the end of the 19th century and they constituted the
majority of the population. The Jewish community was known already in
the 15th century, and during the 16th century the author of the
"Masaat Binyamin" book, Rabbi Binyamin Aharon, who was a student of
the Rama and the Maharshal, served in the town's rabbinate for 40
years.
The team's activity will concentrate mostly in Pidhaitsi's Jewish
Cemetery- one of the largest and oldest in the area. Under the
guidance of the Israeli art researcher, Dr. Boris Chaimovitz from the
Hebrew University, the delegates will describe and document the
cemetery, unveil the antique gravestones which have sunk into the
ground over time, and decipher and document the inscriptions. In
addition, the team will document the Jewish old quarter of the town
and the town's old synagogue which was built in the late 16th century,
and despite the longstanding neglect still holds its beauty. The
team’s findings will be uploaded to Jewish Galicia and Bukovina's
publicly accessible website (www.jewishgalicia.net) after being
analyzed and processed by our researchers.

Oren Haber
Jerusalem, Israel
Reply to: <JewishGalicia_at_gmail.com>

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Received on 2011-07-05 10:27:32