Chico Sanchez: The Dresser

Photo © Chico Sanchez-All Rights Reserved

To break the recent string of India and Asia related posts, here is The Dresser, an audio slideshow by Chico Sanchez, a freelance photographer based in Mexico City.

The Dresser is Cesar Diaz, a professional dresser (el vestidor in Spanish) of religious icons, from Jerez de la Frontera, Cadiz, Spain. In this audio slideshow, Cesar demonstrates how he prepares Our Lady of Sorrows for an Easter Holy Week celebration in the village of Prado del Rey, in Andalusia, Spain.

I've featured the work of Chico Sanchez, a freelance photographer based in Mexico City, on a number of occasions. Chico worked in Venezuela, collaborating with Reuters, European Pressphoto Agency, Agencia EFE, and currently freelances for various newspapers and magazines.

Jewish and "Jewish" Festivals......Shelly Salamensky's Take

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

My friend Shelley Salamensky muses on three Jewish -- or "Jewish" -- festivals: Krakow, Birobidzhan and Hervas, Spain, in the New York Review of Books blog.

The commercial aspects of Hervás’s festival—funded by the village’s chamber of commerce as a boon to local business—are hardly unique. Birobidzhan’s cultural renaissance, has, similarly, garnered it development grants from Moscow; while on the fringes of the Kraków festival, stands sell hook-nosed “Jew” figurines. Yet much more is at stake in both places than profit. In Kraków, with its rich, traumatic history, the festival is an attempt to confront the still relatively fresh loss of what was once the world’s largest Jewish population, as well as the question of Polish complicity with Nazis in the war, communist suppression of Holocaust history, and continuing European intolerance; it’s also a chance for Poles to reflect on their country’s future as a conservative, culturally monolithic nation in a changing, diversifying Europe. Birobizhan’s Jewish cultural revival appears primarily to enliven an isolated, poor, rather bleak place unremarkable but for its unique history. Despite some silliness and confusion, the more sober efforts to teach Yiddish and Jewish history ensure that important legacies are preserved. And perhaps even theme-park-style memorialization is more salutary than the more common case in places from which vital cultures have more or less vanished: sheer oblivion.

In Hervas, the evocation of a Jewish past is so perfunctory and historically fanciful as to border on the offensive. Stars of David adorn street signs, window grates, and even, for no clear reason, the church. There is a Judería Tavern and a Hotel Sinagoga: the former, on inspection, specializing in ham, the latter indistinguishable from a Holiday Inn. On arrival, I was amused by the kitsch; but by my last day, I felt vaguely sick. The empty symbolism cruelly underscored all that Europe has lost.

Spain -- Cemetery Controvery in Toledo Resolved

Philip Carmel, the executive director of the Jewish cemetery preservation organization Lo-Tishkach reports a successful conclusion to the controversy over about 100 graves dug up from the medieval Jewish cemetery in Toledo, Spain to make way for the expansion of a school that already occupies part of the cemetery site.

All the bones were reburied in their original grave sites at a ceremony on Sunday.

As Sam Gruber and I have noted in earlier blog posts, the Toledo construction was halted earlier this year after heated protests, including demonstrations outside Spanish embassies.

Phil makes clear that the government, local authorities and Jewish organizations cooperated to work out a satisfactory solution to the problem.

He writes:

I am pleased to inform you that yesterday, Sunday June 21, saw the reburial of all the bones removed from the medieval cemetery in Toledo. The remains were buried on site in the actual graves from which they had been removed. This was achieved after protracted negotiations which only reached fruition last Thursday in Madrid at which point we decided not to publicise details of the reburial until after it had concluded.

This remarkable and historic solution brings a satisfactory conclusion to a chapter which has seen a tremendous degree of solidarity and cooperation on the part of the Spanish government and the local Jewish federation and a willingness to work together with the Conference of European Rabbis and the Committee for the Preservation of Jewish Cemeteries in Europe to achieve an amicable solution within the boundaries of Halachah.

At all times, we have insisted that the remains of these Toledo Jews should be buried in their chosen resting place and not transferred to another site. We are highly satisfied that the moving ceremony which took place yesterday in the presence of local Jewish leaders, heads of the regional authority of Castilla la Mancha, and the president of the CPJCE, Rabbi Elyokim Schlesinger has given the correct conclusion to our work.

I want to also state for the record our deep gratitude for the unstinting and dedicated work of Ambassador Ana Salomon and the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in assisting us to find a solution to this matter in the face of unwarranted protests and misinformation directed against the Spanish government and the local Jewish Federation.

I hope that our work to save this historic cemetery in Toledo will prove to be a prototype for how governments, local Jewish communities and representative Jewish organisations can work together for the benefit of preserving these cemeteries in Europe.