Not Traveling? Visit Stunning Jewish Sites Across Poland from Home

Visitors of all ages can now virtually explore 3D Jewish heritage sites - from the extravagant to the mundane...

Screenshot from the virtual tour of the Lancut Synagogue, part of the new "Virtual Connections to Material Jewish Heritage in Poland" initiative (Courtesy: The Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland)

“I went outside!”

“How?” I asked my daughter, once again in government-mandated quarantine after a girl in her class tested positive for COVID.

It took me a minute to realize that she hadn’t meant leaving our Jerusalem apartment, but rather leaving a synagogue in some Polish town with one too many consecutive vowels for our tongues to handle…

In just a few minutes, she had “wirtually” toured a number of them… in 3D.

The stunningly-colored engravings of the synagogue in Łańcut (Lancut) enraptured her eight year-old mind.

The main sanctuary in the Lancut Synagogue, 1994. From the Center for Jewish Art at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem via the National Library of Israel Digital Collection. Click here for the virtual tour

As did the overgrown yard of the synagogue in Leczna, and the reconstructed ruins of the house of prayer in Przysucha.

Leczna, 1995 (Photo: Boris Khaimovich). From the Center for Jewish Art at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem via the National Library of Israel Digital Collection.  Click here for the virtual tour
Przysucha, 2004 (Photo: Vladimir Levin). From the Center for Jewish Art at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem via the National Library of Israel Digital Collection. Click here for the virtual tour

From seemingly sprawling campuses to simple shtetl structures, all of the places she visited are part of  “Virtual Connections to Material Jewish Heritage in Poland,” a new initiative of the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland, which aims to open broader access to some of the countless Jewish heritage sites across Poland and facilitate discourse around them. The project was financed by Poland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, within the context of a grant competition entitled “Public Diplomacy 2021”.

The peeling frescos revealing crumbling red bricks inside the Krasnik Synagogue spooked her.

Krasnick, 1991 (Photo: Nomi Kaplan). From the Center for Jewish Art at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem via the National Library of Israel Digital Collection. Click here for the virtual tour

There was one thing, though, which interested her as much as the reconstructed relics of Jewish heritage, and perhaps more. The Polish woman doing something on a balcony across the street – unknowingly captured on film – fascinated her almost to no end.

She felt a need to investigate the woman further. Said something about telling her friends. Couldn’t quite zoom in enough to satisfy her interests.

The balcony woman of Krasnick, person of interest

In that, too, there’s something meaningful, ironic and lovely.

Then she moved on to other destinations, continuing her tour of rural Poland from my laptop.

The synagogue in Zamosc now glimmers like a palace – shiny pristine marble floors, ornate wall details, flashy chandeliers, an impressive Hanukkiyah.

The Great Synagogue of Zamosc. From the Center for Jewish Art at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem via the National Library of Israel Digital Collection. Click here for the virtual tour

Special icons embedded into the tours enable visitors to learn more about some of the structures’ features, as well as the communities they once served.

The Zamosc synagogue cum museum, for example, boasts of the numerous prominent figures who called the town home over the course of some five centuries of Jewish life. The list includes legendary Yiddish literary figure I.L. Peretz; radical activist Rosa Luxemburg; Aleksander Cederbaum, publisher of the first Yiddish-language newspaper in Russia; and Izrael Ben Moshe Halevi, a renowned philosopher, Talmudist and mathematician who taught Moses Mendelssohn.

As opposed to Zamosc, the town of Olsztyn had a relatively young and small Jewish community, which topped out at less than 500 Jews in the 1930s. Its most famous Jewish son, notable architect Erich Mendelssohn, designed the structure that now bears his name and can be visited virtually online through the project: the town’s “Beit Tahara” – the building used to prepare Jewish bodies for burial.

Mendelssohn would go on to design notable buildings throughout Germany and beyond.

Erich Mendelssohn. From the Abraham Schwadron Portrait Collection at the National Library of Israel
Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus shortly before its completion, ca. 1937. It was one of many projects designed by Erich Mendelssohn in the Land of Israel. From the Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi Archive, part of the National Library of Israel Digital Collection

After fleeing the Nazis, he left his architectural imprint around the globe, including many landmarks in Jerusalem, not far from the home of a curious schoolchild, who – for at least one horizon-expanding afternoon – was able to embark on a tour of otherwise unknown historical sites, if only “wirtually”.

 

This article has been published as part of Gesher L’Europa, the National Library of Israel’s initiative to connect with people, institutions and communities across Europe and beyond, through storytelling, knowledge sharing and community engagement.

The Abraham Schwadron Portrait Collection has been reviewed and described thanks to the generous support of The Leir Foundation.

The Star Austrian Poet’s Tragic and Forgotten Jewish “Muse”

Only at the gates of Auschwitz did 'vivacious brunette' Hedwig Bernhard let go of the gift she received from Rainer Maria Rilke...

“...a friendship developed in walks along narrow trails through the forest…" Composite image of the Burgbach Waterfall near Bad Rippoldsau, where Bernhard and Rilke first met, and the only known photo of the couple (Sources: Alexander Migl [CC-BY-SA 4.0] / Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach, Germany)

An early disciple of Sigmund Freud, Dr. Max Eitingon founded the first psychoanalytic institute and clinic in Berlin. Following his death in 1943, most of Eitingon’s renowned collection of books came to the Jewish National and University Library (today’s National Library of Israel) in Jerusalem, where he had fled following the Nazi rise to power.

Dr. Max Eitingon in Jerusalem, ca. 1930s. From the Abraham Schwadron Portrait Collection at the National Library of Israel

One of these books, Das Buch der Bilder (The Book of Images), was one of several works in Eitingon’s collection by Rainer Maria Rilke, a major celebrity of his day and one of the 20th century’s most popular poets.

Eitingon’s path crossed with Rilke’s after the poet’s erstwhile lover and lifelong mentor, the Russian-born writer Lou Andreas-Salomé, attended  a gathering of the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1911. She went on to study with Freud, soon began to practice analysis herself, and brought Rilke with her to the following psychoanalytic congress two years later. But Rilke – despite his recurring bouts of depression – rebuffed her entreaties to be analyzed.

Some three decades later, a copy of Das Buch der Bilder was found at the gates of Auschwitz. It had an inscription from Rilke to another woman, who had been a patient of Eitingon’s. The book was picked up by a guard and its postwar discovery caused a stir, yet little attention was paid to the woman’s own tragic story.

 

A vivacious, melancholy brunette

Hedwig Bernhard, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish merchant in Berlin, was mentally unstable enough for her parents to engage a companion-cum-minder.

Shortly before her 25th birthday, Hedwig Bernhard and her chaperone checked into the same hotel that Rilke was patronizing to overcome his own chronic depression and writer’s block.

Rilke and Bernhard had both taken to the waters at Bad Rippoldsau in the Black Forest to help assuage their ailments.

Bad Rippoldsau, early 20th century (Public domain)

According to Rilke’s biographer Ralph Freedman, she was “a vivacious brunette with a flush of youth but with a kind of searching introspection and sensibility that anxiously reached out to him.” Her self-introduction as an actress “on holiday from her work with the Luisentheater in Berlin” appears throughout the vast number of works on Rilke. She presents herself as an actress in a 1935 letter sent to Martin Buber, yet there is little to no other evidence of her playing on any professional stage.

These rare archival materials appear online here for the first time:

Letter and newspaper clipping featuring a photo of Bernhard, which she sent to Martin Buber, 1935. From the Martin Buber Archive at the National Library of Israel. Click images to enlarge

The Berlin-born physician Theodor Zondek, whose mother was Bernhard’s “lifelong friend,” would reminisce delicately that Bernhard “studied to be an actress but did not follow this career for various reasons” and “decided after an illness to visit a spa.”

 

A fateful encounter

According to Rilke’s biography:

“…a friendship developed in walks along narrow trails through the forest… In her diary Bernhard became eloquent about his soft, melodic voice, his small, fragile figure, his high forehead, and especially his eyes, which she compared to ‘two large, clear blue lakes’.”

Rilke scholars have debated whether Bernhard was for him one of numerous “muses,” or no more than a Kurschatten (spa shadow) – an ephemeral liaison so common at the time that it was “recognized as promoting the cure.”

Rilke and Bernhard at Rippoldsau railroad station on July 5, 1913. The photo was taken with her camera. (Courtesy: Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach, Germany)

During their last night together, Rilke inscribed two volumes of his poetry to Hedwig, adding new, handwritten poems that progressed in intimacy from “Sie” to “Du“.  On their walks, Bernhard had taken several excellent photos of Rilke. When he saw her off at the railway station, she apparently asked a less adept bystander to take a picture of them together. The resulting blurry photo is one of the only surviving images of Bernhard.

 

War and waning affection

Rilke wrote to her for several months – even asking her for copies of the photos to give away to others. But his interest waned. In May 1914, with Bernhard not (yet) willing to undergo analysis, Max wrote to his wife Mirra:

die Bernhard is melancholy…  I have to find a way to get [her] moving somehow.”

That August, World War I broke out.

Rilke’s publisher rushed a Kriegsalmanach for 1915 into print and it became an instant bestseller, featuring five new “chants” by Rilke, “invoking the Kriegs-Gott and calling for a banner of jubilant suffering to be raised.”

Depiction of the “Kriegs-Gott” (“God of War”) appearing in the 1915 Kriegsalmanach. From the National Library of Israel collection

Eitingon, an Austrian citizen like Rilke, had volunteered as a medical officer, and Bernhard sent him a copy (“how friendly of her!” he wrote to his wife Mirra). Unfortunately, it was ruined by stains from the holiday fruitcake that she packed in the same parcel.

Believing Rilke’s affection would last, she surprised him at another spa. But he was already involved with the next of his many “muses,” and stopped writing to her.

Rainer Maria Rilke, 1900. According to Max Eitingon, Rilke “understood the great, boundless lovers among women so well” (Public domain)

Hedwig’s mental state deteriorated and she called on Mirra to inquire about Max, who was away at war.

A letter Bernhard wrote to him still reflected Rilke’s attitude to Freudianism: Max reported indignantly to Mirra that Bernhard asked “whether in my wartime medical activity I had not learned to think differently about [psycho]analysis!” The question touched a sore spot for Eitingon, who had found no scope for analysis while treating battlefield injuries in his field hospital. But Hedwig soon sent “a disguised apology for her question,” which Max gallantly accepted: “of course I know well enough the expressions of ‘resistance’ [to analysis].”

He could but lament Bernhard’s “regrets that now, when she has become ripe for analysis, the doctor is not there.” As all military mail was reviewed by the censors, he added discreetly, “…the hopelessness of her relationship with R— e compounds Miss B’s condition.”

Hedwig regularly visited Mirra Eitingon, who could not but have felt some empathy. Seven years earlier, her own promising career as an actress in Russia and her previous marriage had been derailed by a doomed affair with a famous writer.

Mirra Eitingon as a young woman (Enhanced image / Public domain)

It had plunged her into depression, for which she was referred to Dr. Eitingon. A passionate romance at another Black Forest spa soon developed between Max and Mirra.

Now Max “agreed entirely” with his wife’s intuitive ideas of how to support Bernhard. “Mirrinka,” he lapsed into their common Russian mother tongue, “follow the course of your heart, always tell her when something warm swells up in you while facing her. She is so receptive to it!”

Still, Eitingon could not bring himself to blame Rilke for Bernhard’s plight:

“This wonderful person… understood the great, boundless lovers among women so well… he must be powerless against such great hardship [as Bernhard’s], and must suffer painfully himself.”

A few weeks later, Mirra joined Max at the front as a volunteer nurse.  Whether or not the Eitingons might have helped Bernhard overcome her fixation on Rilke, she never emerged from the obsessive neurosis that Max diagnosed (remotely) as “a cage, of which the iron bars grow inward through the prisoner.”

Mirra Eitingon as a volunteer nurse in the Austro-Hungarian Red Cross during World War I (Enhanced image; original photo courtesy of Prof. Maria Mikhailova, Moscow)

Bernhard ended her diary upon Rilke’s death in 1926, and published some of it in an Austrian newspaper on what would have been his 57th birthday.

In the July 1976 issue of the Association of Jewish Refugees in Great Britain’s newsletter, her friend’s son, Dr. Zondek, recalled that:

“Hedwig Bernhard was a personality whom it is very difficult to forget… She often told us about these meetings [with Rilke] in her impressive way… She produced a box which contained a large number of letters from Rilke… they were her greatest treasure.”

Nearly a decade after Rilke’s death, in her 1935 letter to Martin Buber, she asks for the famous philosopher’s help promoting her oration classes, especially following the rise of the Nazis to power. At the end of the letter, she mentions that it was Rilke who introduced her to Buber’s work.

Little is know of her “theatrical career” or the rest of her life beyond an August 1936 advertisement in the Berlin-based Jewish paper, Jüdische Kulturbund Monatsblatter:

“Hedwig Bernhard, actress and excellent speaker, gives courses in breathing technique and elocution at her home.”

Before her deportation to Auschwitz in 1944, Bernhard entrusted to a non-Jewish friend the letters, diary and Rilke’s gift of a silk scarf.

She kept the books Rilke dedicated to her on her person until the threshold of the gas chamber. Together with some of his letters to her, they wound up in the German Literature Archive at Marbach.

 

This article has been published as part of Gesher L’Europa, the National Library of Israel’s initiative to connect with people, institutions and communities across Europe and beyond, through storytelling, knowledge sharing and community engagement.

A Rare Glimpse of Jewish Schools in Hungary after the Holocaust

Jewish schools after the destruction: View rare photos smuggled into Israel from post-war Hungary

The community of Holocaust survivors in Hungary after WWII numbered about 150,000 Jews. Many tried to leave the communist-controlled country for the Land of Israel and the Americas, but the gates closed in 1949, and Zionist activity was banned. At the same time, many others tried to rehabilitate the glorious Jewish culture that had existed in Hungary until the Holocaust. Special emphasis was placed on education since, remarkably, maintaining Jewish educational frameworks in the communist state was still possible. Many other Jews joined the new regime, and even held senior positions in it.

The National Library of Israel’s Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People has now revealed hundreds of photographs documenting Jewish education in Hungary in the decade after the Holocaust.

The photographs were smuggled into Israel through what would later be called “Nativ—The Liaison Bureau”, which acted on behalf of the State of Israel to strengthen the Zionist and Jewish connection among Jews beyond the Iron Curtain. Some of the photographs were even officially submitted to Israel’s diplomatic representatives in Budapest.

The photographs show the variety of religious streams that characterized Hungarian Jewry even after the Holocaust. They document classroom learning, alongside holiday activities and group photos. From them, one can learn about the strong connection to the Land of Israel among the Holocaust survivors and about Jewish and Zionist education in Hungary.

Some of the younger children in the photographs were born after World War II to parents who survived the Holocaust in Budapest, or who had returned from forced labor. Other children—the older ones—were themselves Holocaust survivors.

Despite the fact that the communist regime imposed severe restrictions on Jewish education, in the decade after the Holocaust, Jewish educational frameworks of various streams, including Hasidic yeshivas, continued to function. However, some of the Talmud Torah schools were actually general Jewish schools and did not resemble ultra-Orthodox institutions elsewhere.

The “Hungarian uprising” against the communist regime broke out in 1956 and was quelled by a Soviet invasion. After the uprising, which had been marked by anti-Semitic nationalist tendencies, and especially after the Soviet crackdown, many Jews emigrated from Hungary.

At the same time, the authorities further restricted national life in the country, while relations with Israel saw a downturn, before they were severed completely in 1967. The photographs provide a rare glimpse of the Jewish schools in Hungary after the Holocaust, just before the final lowering of the Iron Curtain.

Most of the photographs preserved at the National Library are from 1955 and have been made accessible with the support of the Leslie and Vera Keller Foundation for Enhancement of the Jewish Heritage.

Remembering Babi Yar When Others Didn’t

For two decades, one of the worst massacres of the Holocaust was all but forgotten

Early efforts in the 1960s to locate and identify remains at Babi Yar, where some 100,000 people were murdered just twenty years before. From the Emmanuel (Amik) Diamant Archive, the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People at the National Library of Israel (Photo: Joseph Schneider).

On September 29-30, 1941, the Nazis and their collaborators committed one of the Holocaust’s largest massacres, murdering nearly 35,000 Jews in just two days at the Babi Yar (sometimes written “Babyn Yar”) ravine, which was then just outside of Kyiv, and which is now located within the modern Ukrainian city. More than 100,000 people total were murdered there in just two years.

The Babi Yar ravine. From the Emmanuel (Amik) Diamant Collection, the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People at the National Library of Israel (Photo: Joseph Schneider). Click image to enlarge

Yet for years the memory of Babi Yar was in many ways forgotten – the result of efforts to erase and re-write history, as well as the fact that the role and images of the death camps often overshadowed the centrality that other mass murders, like Babi Yar, played in the story of the Holocaust.

In the 1960s this began to change.

In 1961, Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s famous poem, “Babi Yar“, was published. An original manuscript of it has been safeguarded among the National Library of Israel’s collections since shortly thereafter.

Five years later, Anatoly Kuznetsov’s book of the same name came out, and a broader movement led by young local Jews interested in their own heritage and history continued to grow. The personal archive of one of the leaders of this movement, an engineer named Emmanuel (Amik) Diamant, recently came to the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem.

Babi Yar, 1966. From the Emmanuel (Amik) Diamant Collection, the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People at the National Library of Israel (Photo: Joseph Schneider). Click image to enlarge

In 1966, on the 25th anniversary of the massacre, an unofficial memorial sign was hung at the Babi Yar site, which on subsequent anniversaries drew thousands of local Jews and would become a central force in the awakening of Soviet Jewry.

Grassroots efforts also began around that time to locate the mass graves in the area, something else which was certainly not a priority for the Soviet authorities.

Early efforts to locate and identify remains at Babi Yar, 1966. From the Emmanuel (Amik) Diamant Collection, the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People at the National Library of Israel (Photo: Joseph Schneider). Click image to enlarge

Some of these activities were captured on film by Joseph Schneider, a Holocaust survivor, Red Army veteran, anti-Soviet dissident and Zionist activist whose archive also recently came to the CAHJP.

Joseph Schneider, 1960. From the Joseph Schneider Archive, the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People at the National Library of Israel

These photos reveal the grisly yet critical early efforts to better understand the legacy of Babi Yar and remember its victims.

Early efforts to locate and identify remains at Babi Yar, 1966. From the Emmanuel (Amik) Diamant Collection, the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People at the National Library of Israel (Photo: Joseph Schneider). Click images to enlarge

The Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People recently signed an agreement with the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center to share information and resources about Jewish life in Ukraine before the Holocaust, a collaboration which will significantly help scholars better understand the stories of those murdered at Babi Yar.

This article has been published as part of Gesher L’Europa, the National Library of Israel’s initiative to connect with people, institutions and communities across Europe and beyond, through storytelling, knowledge sharing and community engagement.