Salon Jewish Studies Blog

Photographs from the Paul Trevor Collection are available online via VADS: "Academics and artists at London Metropolitan University worked with photographer Paul Trevor to make a selection of his images of East London digitally available to artists, students and researchers. The Collection includes 500 images (chosen from a total of 120,000) of the Spitalfields area from the 1970s to the 1990s, a period of rapid social and physical change." The online collection contains a few pictures documenting Jewish daily life in the area.

The written work Konrad von Grünenberg: Beschreibung der Reise von Konstanz nach Jerusalem (1487) describes a typical journey of a society of pilgrims during the 15th century. Besides beautiful hand drawings the book reveals many topographic details of the holy land. The book was digitized by the Badische Landesbibliothek, Karlsruhe. (via Archivalia@Twitter)

In cooperation with the Jewish Museum of Maryland (JMM), the Baltimore Jewish Times is helping to identify unidentified individuals in historical photographs by presenting them on their webpage.

"The Jewish Museum of Maryland has the largest single collection of regional Jewish Americana in the U.S. Our collections include works of art, historical photographs, clothing, ceremonial items, rare books, everyday objects, documents, oral histories, and memorabilia. The collections embody the story of Jewish life in Maryland - immigration, family history, business, congregational and organizational life, leisure, consumption, and contemporary culture." The JMM hosts a searchable database to the museum collections.

From May 2009 two titles edited by the Salomon Ludwig Steinheim Institute (Leipzig) will be published online:

1) Die rheinischen Juden im Mittelalter
2) Jüdische Friedhöfe in Deutschland – Eine Einführung für Lehrer und Schüler

For more information on the titles see section Mitteilungen of Kalonymos I, 2009

The Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin presents between April 5th and June 29th 2009 the first retrospective of the photographer Liselotte Grschebina (1908-1994) in the framework of the Berliner Festspiele. The exhibition shows 100 photographs taken between 1929 and the 1940s in Germany and Palestine:
"Liselotte Grschebina, née Billigheimer, was born the daughter of a Karlsruhe merchant on 2 May 1908. When she was six years old, her father was killed while serving at the front in the First World War. From 1925 to 1928 she studied at the Baden Art School in Karlsruhe (now a state academy). Upon graduating in 1929 she herself taught photography there until 1931. A year later she opened her own studio under the name of “Bilfoto”, specializing in advertising photography and children’s portraits. Her independence did not last long, as the Nazi seizure of power forced her to close her studio. In March 1934 she and her husband left for Palestine, where they settled in Tel Aviv.
The present retrospective reveals the art of a young woman who in the period of the Weimar Republic was inspired by the New Sobriety (Neue Sachlichkeit). The Neue Sachlichkeit was distinguished by clarity of form and structure and the beauty of simple things. At the same time it had a documentary character, which concentrated on the essence of an object. Grschebina developed this style further in her new home in Palestine and integrated her work with that of the influential group of German photographers, who came with the fifth wave of immigration (Hebrew: aliyah) and settled mainly in Tel Aviv." (Gropius-Bau website)

A new podcast Leon Merrick: Importance of Work in the Lodz Ghetto is available on U.S. Holcaust Memorial Museum website.

"Everybody had to have a job. Because if you had a job you get an extra bowl of soup in the place of wherever you work. So my father worked in the main hospital, we had five hospitals in the ghetto. They were clinics before the war, but then the Jews came in when they formed the ghetto, so they made a hospital. And my father worked in the hospital and my mother got a job in the orphanage. And of course later on, in a couple years or so, I wanted to get a job too. I’d seen these young fellows going around with satchels delivering mail so I told my father, “Maybe I can do…maybe I can do this.”
But later on, so for the first year and a half I had no jobs. My mother worked, and from the place of employment she got an extra bowl of soup so she can share the remaining ration with us. My father he also worked, he also got some food." (fragment of the transcript)

(via USHMM@Twitter)

The exhibition Sent to their death, the deportation of Jews, Roma and Sinti from Hamburg 1940 to 1945 (Kunsthaus [Arthouse], Hamburg] "is designed with a conceptual focus on the perspectives of more than 7,500 deportees and what happened to them at the sites of deportation. It includes video and audio interviews with survivors, photos, documents such as letters and diaries, and original memento items. These exhibition items help give back to the victims their faces and their life stories, which have been obscured by the anonymous lists, standardized forms, and the administrative operations of the perpetrators, with their seemingly 'correct' division of labor.
" (www.deportationsausstellung.hamburg.de)

(via H-Soz-u-Kult)

(front-cover of the catalog Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater)

The Jewish Museum, New York presented "the first exhibition devoted to the extraordinary artwork created for Russian Jewish theater productions in the 1920s and 1930s. The exhibition will bring to light a remarkable period in the early years of the Soviet Union when innovative visual artists, including Marc Chagall, Natan Altman, and Robert Falk joined forces with avant-garde playwrights, actors, and theatrical producers to create a theater experience with extraordinary mass appeal. Through paintings, costume and set designs, posters, photographs, film clips and theater ephemera - many of which have never been exhibited before- Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater, 1919-1949 will capture an exhilarating but fleeting moment in the cultural history of the Soviet Union."

Andrea Kirsh wrote an exciting article about "a fascinating exhibition" in theartblog.org

Even if the exhibition moves to the Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco, from April 25 to September 7, 2009), selected artifacts and extensive information on the subject can be found on the Website of the Jewish Museum, New York

Further Online Exhibitions at N.Y.C. Jewish Museum are:

1) Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976

2) Off the Wall: Artists at Work

3) From The New Yorker to Shrek: The Art of William Steig

4) Camille Pissarro: Impressions of City and Country

5) The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend

6) Dateline Israel: New Photography and Video Art

"Tuning Baghdad brings together a growing archive of rare video footage, audio clips and historical information on Iraqi Jewish musicians and the music scene that was displaced from Baghdad in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The last generation of Iraqi Jewish musicians who performed in Baghdad, now in their 70s and 80s, represent an era when an unusually large number of the Iraqi-Jews were composing and performing Arabic music. For decades, these musicians were the national teachers and beloved performers of Iraq’s traditional maqams and modern compositions on Iraq’s National Broadcast Station.
Many of these Iraqi musicians and enthusiasts now live in Israel, England or North America where they trade home-made cassettes and organize musical parties at which this international community comes together. The musicians continue to play and produce an Arabic repertoire of Iraqi folk songs, popular Egyptian and Lebanese songs as well as Iraqi-Jewish ceremonial songs at weddings and Bar-Mitzvahs. The video chapters on this website feature intimate performances, conversations in Iraqi-Jewish dialect, and rehearsals with key musicians, fans, historians and ethnomusicologists. They also feature home-movies of ‘Charlghis’ from the 1970s until today. The podcasts and links accompanying each video act as tangents, providing an expanded layer to the performers, the songs, and their lyrics. To accommodate this complex scene, the audio/visual component will be regularly updated with donations of rare cassettes and footage."

Up to now, following podcasts including additional audio material are available in the categories (no direct links available) listed below:

1) Audiotopia ("various Arabic music jam sessions by Iraqi-Jewish musicians now living in Israel") - fifteen audio-tracks of Imam and Naim;

2) On the maqam ("records some attempts to explain the eastern scale of music called the ‘maqam’, to Western listeners") four audio-tracks of Yair Dalal, Elias Shasha and Abraham Salman;

3) Musicans in Iraq ("a chapter narrated by Yeheskel Kojaman one of the few ethnomusicologists who has first-hand experience and knowledge of the popular music scene in Iraq before the emigration of the Jewish population") two audio-tracks of Rashid Al-Qundarchi and Yakub Al-Imari

4) Life of the party ("a compilation of excerpts from home movies taken at ‘charlghis’ or house-parties in the [Jewish] diaspora from the 1970s until the 2000s")four audio-tracks (incl. mixed tapes) of Sol Basha and Abdel Halim Hafez

5) Other features a radio interview with Regine Basha and Julieta Aranda about Radio Baghdad as well as two recordings "Babylonian Selihot" produced by Yakhin Hakal

(tuningBaghdad.net via http://twitter.com/teruah)

The project holocaust.cz (English short version available) developed by the Terezin Initiative Institute aims to provide information on the history of the Holocaust (and related information) to the Czech public, including interviews with survivors, documents and texts. holocaust.cz was especially designed for use in Czech schools with the focus on the history of the "Final Solution" in Czech Lands and of the Terezin Ghetto.

"The Charles Booth Online Archive is a searchable resource giving access to archive material from the Booth collections of the Archives Division of the Library of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and the Senate House Library.The Booth collection at LSE Archives contains the original records from Booth's survey into life and labour in London, dating from 1886 [?] to 1903."
In the framework of this project the philanthropist's notebooks related to the Jewish community of London are available online (among others). Four notebooks originated from 1884 until 1987 can be viewed in PDF.

(picture above: Charles Booth in the Encycopedia Britannica)

The website sonderarchiv.de by Sebastian Panwitz, provides extensive information on the long time unaccessible record groups of the "Sonderarchiv" at the Military State Archives Moscow. A large number of the hosted archival collections are still waiting for scholarly investigation, because the archives just opened in 1990.
The website is not an official rather than a complete presentation, but a collection of as much information as available for the moment, alludes Sebastian Panwitz. Besides information concretely refering to the records groups, you will find usefull information on the history of the archives, on traveling to Russia as well as accomplishments on the working conditions at the scene.
The record list contains over 650 entries. Among them are a huge number of personal papers, institutional collections and papers of Jewish communities from all over Europe. Additional information is added on over 80 record groups. For example, you will find inventories on following personal paper collections (incl. record-no.; PDF):

Furthermore an article Die Judaica im 'Sonderarchiv Moskau' by Sebastian Panwitz was published in Medaon - Magazin fuer juedisches Leben in Forschung und Bildung.

The Blog Brandeis Special Collection Spotlight offers the opportunity to take a closer look into selected treasures from the Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections at Brandeis University. "The Archives and Special Collections department houses the gems of the Brandeis library. The rare book collection includes incunabula; books published in the 16th - 18th centuries on such subjects as history, English and American literature, philosophy, and Judaica [emphasis by author]; first and limited editions; and fine press publications. Book collections of note include the Baldwin Shakespeare collection and the McKew-Parr collection on Magellan and the Age of Discovery. Special Collections also holds literary manuscripts of European and American authors such as John Cheever and Joseph Heller, as well as music collections and photographic collections. In addition, it includes collections of materials on the Spanish Civil War, left- and right-wing movements in the United States in the latter half of the twentieth century, anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, twentieth-century anti-alien and anti-radical movements in the United States, and Zionism. The department also includes the papers of prominent political figures such as Louis D. Brandeis, Benjamin Disraeli, and Daniel Webster."

Photography in Jerusalem, a website created by Hadassah College in cooperation with the educational website Snunit presents a carefully selected collection of pictures taken in the first half of the 20th Century together with some biographical information on the photographers. Amongst the photographers who are presented that way is pioneer Tsadok Bassan (1882-1956), the "court photographer" of the orthodox Old Yishuv, who also photographed the city's streets and population, and Alfred Bernheim (1885-1974), who documented documented the buildings of the architect Erich Mendelsohn and photographed many personalities of the cultural political Jewish elite in the 1940s. [Languages: English, Hebrew]

On Thursday the online archive Forced Labor 1939-1945 - Memory and History (only English homepage) was presented for the first time to the public. The project is a cooperation between the Freie Universität Berlin, the German Historical Museum and the Foundation "Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft" (Remembrance, Responsibility and Future). It is dedicated to over 12 Mio persons who had been forced to work for Nazi-Germany during WWII.
The archive provides access to 590 (192 video, 398 audio) interviews with 590 eyewitnesses from 26 countries. In addition to the interviews you will find transcripts, personal documents and photographs in the digital archive.
The access to the archive is restricted to (especially) pupils, students, scholars, research centers and further public institutions. ( For more information, please check the disclaimer [German only]). For further press material (English & German) click here.

The joint "project in progress" תמונות היסטוריות של ארץ ישראל - Historical photographs of the land of Israel (It is recommended to use the Hebrew homepage) documents in over 8.200 photographs -professionals and hobbyiest - Israels "characteristic landscapes and distinctive populace". The database (built with Digitool), set up and hosted by the Haifa University Library in cooperation with the Haifa University Department of Land of Israel Studies and the "Bitmuna"-Laboratory of Nadav Mann form Kibbutz Merhavia, includes 18 collections. Among them are the:

It is written on the homepage: "Over a period of many years, the Land was photographed from North to South by pilgrims, tourists and immigrants who were enchanted by the vision that greeted their eyes. Rare collections of photographs, stored in private homes, archives and assorted institutions, are in real danger of irreparable decay due to the ravages of time." According to this the project aims to preserve and present these unique photographs as part of Israeli cultural heritage.

The Center for Holcaust & Genocide Studies at University of Minnesota provides access to a huge collection of materials for use in Holocaust and genocide education. Besides Online Museum Exhibitions and Holocaust Memorials a section called Artistic Responses can be found. It presents artworks of over fifty artists.
For example information on the life and work of David Friedmann (student of Leo Kober, Hermann Struck as well as Lovis Corinth and one of the most famous press artists in the 1920s) is included.
He is cited as followed on the page: "I tried everything to make a living as a sign painter, as artist to sell pictures, and as a contractor again like in Berlin under the Nazi Regime. After Miriam was born, I had to work for three, harder than before and saw no future for us here in Israel. In 1951, I had a one-man show in Tel-Aviv with paintings of the concentration camps. I am sorry to say, the interest was only small and learned people did not want to talk about concentration camps. After I was retired in 1962, sometimes I had the idea to try again, but was afraid to start, had no courage and also in consideration of my wife Hilde. I had to lock my feelings in a kind of jail and close the door. So sometimes I went out, painted pictures from nature and worked on my book, later I went to the libraries to make sketches, also sketches in the streets, parks and alleys. In March 1963, I had a small exhibition in the Central Library, but it was not satisfying. I thought about the time between 1946 and 1948 when I was a successful artist. In December 1963, I had enough. I told myself that all the paintings on the wall mean nothing, they no longer satisfy me, anyone can paint like that. I have to do something that nobody can do in the same way. I opened the door of the jail and in the night quietly left our bedroom for my studio, placed a piece of paper on the easel, took charcoal and made my first sketch. Now I was free again and from that time on nobody was able to stop me. In the short time of only four and one-half months, twenty-eight new drawings were finished... Now I am satisfied, because what I am doing is not only for myself. I wish everyone had to take a good look at the artwork. They have to look at what persecution under the Nazi Regime was, and it can happen again, for in America to be a Nazi, to be a Communist is not prohibited. Against an evil world I will work further to try to put my feelings down on canvas or paper against anti-Semitism, against race hatred of all people." (source: CHGS)

A service provided by the photographic agency of the RMN, the assembly of national museums of France, allows to search and sight also big parts of the holdings of the Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme in Paris: 1087 digital images of the museums impressive collection of ceremonial and profane art are available online.

Remarkable is furthermore the museums collection of printed material, a collection that includes many examples of modernist Yiddish book design from the 1920s and early 30s. Next to works of household names like Nathan Altman, Marc Chagall, and El Lissitzky, one can discover here a number of less-known artists and designers and their work. For example the constructivist Yiddish typography of Mark Epstheyn and Issachar Ryback's groundbreaking children's book illustrations.

The digitized material is also accessible via Europeana.

In the framework of the Project ben Yehuda (see also: Digitized Resouces/Hebrew on Salon JS) the complete writings of Chaim Nachman Bialik are published online in Hebrew.

You will find literature of following further authors: Abraham Regelson, R' Jehuda haLevi, Naftali Herz Imber, David Jeschajahu Silberbusch, Moshe Beilinson, Josef Achronowitz, Nachum Sokolow, Josef Rivlin, Mordechai ben Hillel haCohen, Perez Smolanskin.

The Ludwik Fleck Zentrum at the Collegium Helveticum in Zurich is conceived as a place for research on the life and thought of Ludwik Fleck (1896-1961). Fleck, a medical doctor and biologist, who ranks as a thought leader of present-day critical philosophy of science, is also known for achieving the production of vaccine against typhus fever under the conditions of the Lemberg ghetto in 1942.