Exhibitions -- More on Mark Epstein show in Kiev

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

I posted recently about retrospective show of the work of Ukrainian (Jewish) avant garde  artist Mark Epstein -- the Forward has a nice piece going into detail about the artist and his work.

Born Moyshe Epshtein in Bobruisk, White Russia, Epshtein moved at a young age to Kiev with his family, where he entered art school. According to one story, when Epshtein was barely 10 years old, his mother sent him to bring water from the well. When he didn’t return his mother went looking for him, and found him building a sculpture of Leo Tolstoy out of snow. A neighboring photographer took a picture of the boy with his sculpture, and the picture was later was given to the Tolstoy Museum.
The story illustrates not only Epshtein’s talent and love of art, but also the tragic fate of his work. Like his childhood snowman, almost all of Epshtein’s sculptures have been lost or destroyed, with only a photographic record of them remaining. Moreover, because of his overt Jewishness Epshtein was never included in official versions of Soviet art history. Neither has he been much appreciated by Jewish art historians, presumably because his artistic vision didn’t accord with their own ideas about Jewish art.

Read more: http://blogs.forward.com/the-arty-semite/135434/#ixzz1E3pUPbxT

Jewish Museums -- New article on Casablanca

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

I have posted in the past about the Jewish Museum in Casablanca, Morocco -- to date the only Jewish museum in the Arab world. (For web sites on Jewish Morocco, click HERE and  HERE)

There is a new article now on AFP/European Jewish Press.

Founded in 1997, the Jewish museum assembles a hodgepodge of objects -- clothes, tools, even a jeweller's studio -- that attest to the rich history of the country's 2,000-year-old Jewish community.


"It's the only Jewish museum in the Arab world," said museum curator Zhor Rehihil, a Moroccan civil servant who is Muslim.


Some 5,000 Jews live in Morocco today -- including 2,000 in Casablanca, according to Rehihil's estimates.


The school visits "show to Moroccans that there are other Moroccans with other religious beliefs," she said.


And the museum's philosophy?


"That the Jews of Morocco did not disappear without a trace," says
76-year-old Simon Levy, who has directed the museum since its creation.


He wants Morocco to acknowledge its Jewish heritage in other ways -- namely in history textbooks, which he says is not currently the case.

Candlesticks on Stone - another cross post from the blog

Tombstone carver at work, 1916 (image from Bildarchiv, National Library, Vienna)

Stone-carver picture: a master at work

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

I’m posting this wonderful picture that Sergey Kravstov sent me of a tombstone carver in his shop in the town of Volodymyr-Volyn’skyi, Ukraine (known in Yiddish as Ludmir), in the Autumn of 1916 (the date is known from the date on the tombstone in the picture, which is assumed to have been carved — and painted — within the month after the funeral). The photo is from a glass negative held in the Bildarchiv (picture archive) of the National Library in Vienna.

The town is just inside today’s Ukraine near the Polish border, between Zamosc in Poland and Lutsk, Ukraine. At the time the picture was taken, about 6,000 Jews lived in the town.

If the finished stone show in any indication, this carver’s work was very simple — uh, minimalist? — and in no way approached the splendid sculptural style of past centuries. But — the picture clearly shows how the tombstone was painted. As seen below, this practice is still alive in Ukraine — in this picture, in the village of Sharhorod. (See comments to this post at the Candlesticks on Stone blog for a discussion of the methodology of painting and tombstones.)

Sharhorod, Ukraine -- sketched candlesticks and painted color.

Middle East -- Synagogue being restored in Damascus

This is off geographical topic, but Bloomberg runs a piece by Massoud A. Derhally noting a project begun in December to restore synagogues in Damascus, Syria.

Albert Cameo, leader of what remains of the Jewish community in Syria, says he’s trying to fulfill an obligation to his religious heritage. The 70-year-old is organizing the restoration of a synagogue called Al-Raqi in the old Jewish quarter of Damascus built during the Ottoman Empire about 400 years ago. The project, which began in December, will be completed this month as part of a plan to restore 10 synagogues with the backing of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and funding from Syrian Jews.

“Assad sees the rebuilding of Jewish Damascus in the context of preserving the secularism of Syria,” said Josh Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. “This is an effort by the regime to show its seriousness and an olive branch to the Jewish community in America, which they have been wooing.”

While Syria is still officially at war with Israel, the country is trying to portray itself as a more tolerant state to help burnish its image internationally. Syria’s 200 Jews are mirroring the actions of their co-religionists in Lebanon, where restoration work began on Beirut’s Maghen Abraham Synagogue in July 2009.

Candlesticks on Stone -- cross post from the blog

Here's a crosspost from the Candlesticks on Stone blog, considering the question of  when did candlesticks become standard shorthand for denoting a woman.

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Using candlesticks and candelabra to denote women on tombstones was very common by the mid to late 19th century in the parts of Eastern Europe where I have been focusing this study (northern Romania/Ukraine/Poland and surrounding territory). Indeed, by the late 19th century and early 20th century  this imagery was utilized almost across the board (though birds and flowers were also used), and there was even a variety of  pre-fab templates of fanciful candlesticks, including the style that marked the grave of of my great-great-grandmother, Chaya Dwoira, in the Jewish cemetery in Radauti.
These templates are striking but not great examples of stone-carving — though they derived from the wonderfully sculpted and imaginative stones of the 18th and early 19th centuries (and even in the 17th century). But, when massed together in a crowd, as in Radauti, they are very impressive nonetheless, providing a sense of — well — community or communality, in a way. 100 years and more ago they would have presented even a more striking sight, as they would have been painted bright colors.

Amid the forest of stones, the tomb of Chaya Dvoira (small stone in middle, at left)

Some of these “off the shelf” designs are rooted in the earlier designs of braided candelabra branches and bases that formed the mystical “endless knot” motif. Others attach leaves or sprouts to the candelabras, referring, I imagine to the also mystical “candelabra/menorah as tree of life” motif. Some show hands blessing the flames; others do not. What is interesting, too, is that even stones that looks as if they were carved from identical stencils often differ in subtle ways — note, for example, how the hands are carved differently, and how there are other slight differences in the ornamentation.

Radauti -- tremplate design with candles sprouting leaves

 

                     Radauti -- tremplate designs with candles sprouting leaves

When did the candlesticks imagery become the norm?

In the Old Jewish Cemetery in Siret, Romania,  some of the women’s tombs dating to the very early 19th century bear candle imagery (one has the representation of an antique-looking menorah, others with more fanciful candelabra, in combination with plant motifs).

And some candelabra or candle-bearing stones in Ukraine  date back as early as the mid-18th century. These were documented by the researcher Boris Khaimovich from the Center for Jewish Art, who did his PhD on 17th and 18th century Jewish tombstones in Ukraine. Boris reports that the stone of Esther daughter of Yitzchak, which dates from 1781, is one of the oldest stones in the Jewish cemetery in Kosuv, Ukraine. It shows hands blessing the flames on a seven-branched Menorah and may be one of the earliest stones to bear this image of blessing hands.

Otherwise, the older stones do not seem necessarily to use a specific visual signifier for woman. In the cemetery at Sataniv, for example, the tombstone of Rivkah bat Eliezar Susman, from 1803, bears the mysterious “three hares” carving — three hares joined at the ears an in optical illustion — in a floral medallion flanked by birds and griffons.

Sataniv, Ukraine, 2006 -- woman's tomb with the Three Hares motif

Romania -- Lo-Tishkach publishes a gallery of my photos

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

The Lo-Tishkach web site has published a gallery of my photos of Jewish cemeteries in Romania. You can view it by clicking HERE

Candlesticks on Stone -- Tombstone Typology

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

I have created a rather cool page on my (Candle)sticks on Stone web site, showing some of the many different types and styles of candlesticks used to decorate the tombstones of women in Eastern Europe.

They range from what I would call “classic” Shabbos candles — two matched candles in individual candle-holders — to multi-branched candelabra (including seven-branched menorahs) of various types. Some of them look as if they could have come off of a household’s shelf. Others  look like classic Menorahs of antiquity. Many are elaborately ornamental but still look like physical objects. But others still are intricate figures that weave and twist and entwine the branches of the menorah and/or the base of the menorah into fanciful convoluted forms. And some clearly combine the imagery of the Menorah with that of the Tree of Life — or, perhaps, of death, as in some examples the branches of the menorah may look like snakes.

Some stones bear images of hands blessing the flames.

In their fascinating and wonderful book Traditional Jewish Papercuts: An Inner World of Art and Symbol (Hanover NH, 2002), Joseph and Yehudit Shadur write that the intricately convoluted menorah forms appear almost exclusively  in  two places — in traditional East European Jewish paper cuts (where they are often dominant compositional elements) and on some East European Jewish tombstones. They appear to represent a development of the “endless knot” motif.
The Shadurs write (pp 170-171):

As far as we could ascertain, neither the convoluted menorah configurations nor the endless-knot motif have ever been considered as distinct visual symbols in Jewish iconography. And yet, they are so common and figure so prominently in East-European Jewish papercuts that they can hardly be regarded as mere decorative motifs.

They theorize that

the metamorphosis of the traditional menorah of antiquity and the Middle Ages into the convoluted, endless-knot configurations appearing in the papercuts coincides with the spread and growing popularization of messianic mysticism and the Kabbalah throughout the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe from the early eighteenth century on [.]

In her  book A Tribe of Stones, Jewish Cemeteries in Poland (Warsaw 1994) Monika Krajewska, a post-World War II pioneer in the study of gravestone imagery — who is also an accomplished paper-cut artist, likens the twisted menorahs to the braiding of Challah loaves — and in a way, that would mean that the images denote two of the three “women’s commandments” (lighting the Shabbos candles, “taking Challah” or removing a piece of dough when baking bread, and Niddah, or keeping menstrual purity).