Naomi Schacter speaking at the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan
In June of 2018, Dr. Yoel Finkleman, Curator of the Haim and Hanna Salomon Judaica Collection at the National Library of Israel, presented fascinating insights about the twists and turns of the Jewish language as it evolved with the wanderings of the Jewish people, in honor of the opening of a new National Library of Israel exhibit at the Marlene Meyerson JCC in Manhattan, New York.
Throughout history, the Jewish community has been carried by, among other things, distinctive Jewish languages, explained Dr, Finkelman. Over the centuries, Jews have created new languages, combining Hebrew with the dialects of their home countries and developing distinctive localized languages, such as Yiddish and Ladino. In other cases, their language was largely comprised of the local vernacular written in Hebrew characters, such as Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Persian.
Dr. Yoel Finkleman speaking at the Marlene Meyerson JCC, Manhattan
Even when Jews were fully comfortable in the local vernacular, they often had a unique vocabulary that would pepper their speech with uniquely Jewish terms and expressions, such as the Yeshivish dialect of today’s Orthodox young men.
The National Library of Israel recently acquired 250 manuscripts from Bamiyan in Northern Afghanistan, from a collection known as the Afghan Genizah. These manuscripts are written in Arabic, Aramaic, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Persian, exhibiting the diversity of Jewish language. From medieval Afghani receipt books to contemporary comic books, unique Jewish languages are a central building block of Jewish culture.
The exhibit, “Curating the Past, Creating the Future,” at the JCC Manhattan.
The exhibition, “Curating the Past, Creating the Future,” developed in partnership with the JCC Manhattan, presents highlights from the Library’s vast collections, which contain manuscripts, books, posters, maps, music, photographs and more. The Library treasures reflect and reveal Jewish life across continents and centuries, and highlight the diverse history and cultures of Israel and its region.
In honor of Israel’s 70th year of independence, the exhibit also includes wonderful examples of the official Independence Day posters produced in celebration throughout the decades.
Independence Day posters from the exhibit, “Curating the Past, Creating the Future,” at the JCC Manhattan.
The event was attended by over 70 people. Ruth and Sandy Gottesman, leading partners in the Library renewal, participated in the event, along with other colleagues, friends and donors from the area.
Invitation to NLI event at the JCC
Also in attendance was Dr. Jacqueline Heller, who sponsored the exhibit in memory of her parents, Joseph Heller and Fanya Gottesfeld Heller, whose commitment to Jewish life, culture, and history extends from New York to Israel.
The Nazi Atrocities Revealed in Invisible Ink
Postcards and coded letters sent from a concentration camp written in urine reveal the secret experiments performed on human subjects.
Lola Bergman's postcard sent from Krakow to Jakob Rosenblum in Bucharest. The Yad Vashem Archives.
In a small museum in Poland there is a display of letters which reveal information on a series of Nazi experiments on humans subjects. These letters were written in invisible ink made from urine in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. The medical experiments were performed on Polish political prisoners. The letters were donated to the “Saints Under the Clock” museum in Lublin in Eastern Poland, by the family of one of the former prisoners, Krystyna Czyż-Wilgat.
During the Holocaust, Nazi Germany conducted medical experiments on humans – not only in the Auschwitz camp, but also in Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, and others. Ravensbrück was a German concentration camp for women in northern Germany. Between 1939 and 1945, some 132,000 prisoners passed through the camp, including about 40,000 Poles and 26,000 Jews.
At Auschwitz, brutal experiments of marginal medical value were conducted, such as attempting to change eye color by injecting chemicals into the eyes of children. At Ravensbrück however, the experiments were designed to improve the health of German soldiers. Modern penicillin was not yet available and many German soldiers died of gangrene caused by infected wounds. In the attempt to find alternative medicines to cure infections, the Nazis implanted bacteria into the leg bones and muscles of soldiers by inserting pieces of wood or glass into the wounds. The human victims of experiments in the lab were called little rabbits. The experiments were also conducted on 74 Polish women, young and healthy, whose names appear in the 27 letters that contain hidden messages about the horrors of the experiments they were part of in the camp.
In the concentration camps it was forbidden to hold any personal belongings. Correspondence was permitted under strict regulation and with the scrutiny of censorship. It was possible to send letters from the camp that contained neutral information that was approved by the censors, but several prisoners managed, through the use of invisible ink made of human urine, to inform their families and the world of the shocking medical experiments being conducted.
The brilliant idea to write using urine as ink belonged to Janina Iwańska and was carried out by Krystyna Czyż who had a very clear and beautiful handwriting. Their extraordinary intelligence and love of literature was the key. In her first letter to her brother, Krystyna mentioned the period when they would read books together. She particularly emphasized the book, “Satan from the Seventh Grade,” by the Polish children’s author Kornel Makuszyński. In that novel, the hero sends a letter in which the first letters of each line of text, when put together, form a secret message. Krystyna also placed the words “letter,” and “urine,” in the overt text. Krystyna’s brother understood the intentions and knew what to do. That was how their secret correspondence began.
One of the envelopes containing text written in human urine from the Ravensbrück women’s camp between 1943-1944
Janina Iwańska planned to escape the prison and wrote a secret text on the envelope containing a letter addressed to her father. The letter itself contained some clues indicating that the envelope held secret information written in invisible ink. Since the letter did not have a censorship stamp, it was likely smuggled out by prisoners working in the factories outside the camp. Once the letter reached its destination, the recipients still faced the task of reading the invisible text. The usual method was to heat the pieces of paper with the hidden text using an iron. Thanks to the encrypted messages, the list of 74 women from Lublin who had undergone medical experiments by Nazi doctors in Ravensbrück was made public in the first few years following the end of World War II. In addition to information on medical experiments which included the intentional infection of wounds for the sake of testing new drugs, the letters also contained information about the camp’s operations, punishments and executions.
A letter written and sent by Janina Iwańska from the Ravensbrück concentration camp to her father on May 6, 1943
In 1995, Yad Vashem received a postcard containing a message written in hidden ink to add to their collections. This seemingly innocent postcard was sent by a woman from Krakow, Poland, to Bucharest, the capitol of Romania in 1943. It contains a secret message written in invisible ink describing terrible conditions in a concentration camp. The postcard is part of a collection of letters and postcards, yellow patches and other objects which were donated to the Yad Vashem Archives as part of the estate of Theodore Feldman, a Romanian-born Holocaust survivor who passed away in 1993. According to the donor of the collection, Elisheva Ezri, Feldman’s daughter, her father purchased the postcard in a small town near Bucharest. On the postcard, in addition to the addressee and the address, there is a short text is spread out along two lines and written in German: “My dear, I’ll remember you with love. Lola, Krakow, 20.8.1943.”
The back side of Lola Bergman’s postcard sent from Krakow to Jakob Rosenblum in Bucharest. The postcard is kept in the Yad Vashem Archives and is an integral part of a collection of letters from the Holocaust period.
The sender of the postcard was Lola Bergmann of Krakow. Her address did not contain a street name. The recipient was Yaakov Rosenblum, who, according to the address, lived in the Jewish ghetto in Bucharest. The invisible message included was sent by a man called Otto. The text, written in invisible ink, was in German and contains inside information about one of the concentration camps in the area, incuding details of a well-organized underground movement. The letter even contained a request for aid and equipment suitable for advanced underground warfare conditions, which lends to the theory that this was a part of an espionage operation on behalf of the Allies.
The front of Lola Bergman’s postcard sent from Krakow to Jakob Rosenblum in Bucharest. The postcard is kept in the Yad Vashem Archives and is part of a collection of letters from the Holocaust period.
The postcard bears the stamp of the Romanian censor, indicating that it had indeed reached Romania, but it is unclear whether it was read by the addressee or not. According to Elisheva Ezri, Feldman himself made the secret text visible by heating up both sides of the postcard with a household clothing iron. If that is the case, it can be concluded that the postcard did not reach the destination or that if it arrived, it seems that it was not clear to the recipient that it contained a message written in secret ink. In addition, the ink may belong to a group of chemicals that can be removed and then made visible when it comes in contact with another chemical. There are many materials and recipes for manufacturing hidden ink and many methods for making the hidden text visible. The use of secret ink for transmitting secret messages was already well known during World War I, and the censor was alert to this even during World War II. Across the postcard is a thick, light brown line. This line attests to an attempt to discover the hidden text using chemical material. Was the hidden text of the postcard visible and therefore caught by the censors? Or was it able to evade censorship because censorship checks could not identify the secret ink?
Frederick Accum qutoes the Book of Kings 2 on the cover of his treatise, 1820
In 1820, an essay about the fraudulent additives put in food was published in England, by one Frederick Accum. It was titled,A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons, and it sold over one thousand copies in the first month.
Frederick Accum was a pharmacist in Hanover who immigrated on his own to England at the age of 24. He made his way into the the world of apothecary and chemistry in England and was soon mastering English and the science field in which he was apprenticing.
At the turn of the 19th century, Compton Street in London was the center of scientific research in England and it was there that Accum situated himself selling lab equipment and taking his own risks in the lab while working on gas and gaslight. It was that audaciousness in the lab that would lead him on his crusade against the liars in the food industry.
Title page of “A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons”. From the Sidney Edelstein Collection, the National Library of Israel
“Adulteration of Bread.
This is one of the sophistications of the articles of food most commonly practiced in this metropolis, where the goodness of bread is estimated entirely by its whiteness. It is therefore usual to add a certain quantity of alum to the dough; this improves the look of the bread very much, and renders it whiter and firmer. Good, white, and porous bread, may certainly be manufactured from good wheaten flour alone; but to produce the degree of whiteness rendered indispensable by the caprice of the consumers in London, it is necessary (unless the very best flour is employed,) that the dough should be bleached; and no substance has hitherto been found to answer this purpose better than alum.”
His risk taking and seemingly condescending attitude was clear when he went after those he considered food tainters and fraudsters. In 1820, Accum’s treatise denounced the use of toxic food additives and marked the beginning of a social consciousness in the approach to food. Accum’s publication addressing the issue of food adulteration by companies became a best seller, with three editions come out in the same year.
The treatise contained methods of detecting the additives, explained in what foods they were found, and the harm they could do if and when consumed.
“Poisonous Soda Water.
The beverage called soda water is frequently contaminated both with copper and lead; these metals being largely employed in the construction of the apparatus for preparing the carbonated water, and the great excess of carbonic acid which the water contains, particularly enables it to act strongly on the metallic substances of the apparatus; a truth, of which the reader will find no difficulty in convincing himself, by suffering a stream of sulphuretted hydrogen gas to pass through the water.”
While his treatise became immensely popular, London’s food producers viewed him as enemy number one.
In the second edition of the book, Accum writes in the foreword that he had received threats from the businesses whose reputation he had “tarnished” by publishing the truth about their dealings. Accum would continue to report the crimes of these businesses and the cheats who were not only guilty of lying to the public, but who were in fact, poisoning the public.
“Poisonous Cheese.
Several instances have come under my notice in which Gloucester cheese has been contaminated with red lead, and has produced serious consequences on being taken into the stomach. In one poisonous sample which it fell to my lot to investigate, the evil had been caused by the sophistication of the anotta, employed for colouring cheese.”
Accum continued publishing more works on food that the public consumed much like the recipes contain within “A Treatise on the Art of Brewing,” “A Treatise on the Art of Making Wine,” and “A Treatise on the Art of Making Good and Wholesome Bread”.
“A Treatise on the Art of Making Good and Wholesome Bread”. From the Sidney Edelstein Collection, the National Library of Israel
Though he was forced to return to Germany after being persecuted by his poisonous enemies, his works continued to be printed and reprinted and were then translated into French, Italian and German, reaching a wide readership in Europe and in the United States.
Frederick was born in 1769 to a father and a French mother who had fled from France with her family due to the persecution of Protestants by Catholics. His father had converted from Judaism to Christianity and had changed his name from Markus Herz to Christian Accum at the time of his baptism in 1755. Beyond picking the name “Christian”, Accum’s father made the interesting choice of changing his surname to a word derived from the Hebrew “Akum”, an acronym meaning “a worshiper of stars and signs”, which was traditionally used to refer to Gentiles.
