Salon Jewish Studies Blog

"Today, on April 21, 2009, the World Digital Library, one of the most significant projects refering to digital primary sources on different cultures across the world, was launched.

The mission:

"The World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.

The principal objectives of the WDL are to:

Promote international and intercultural understanding;
Expand the volume and variety of cultural content on the Internet;
Provide resources for educators, scholars, and general audiences;
Build capacity in partner institutions to narrow the digital divide within and between countries."

"The Jewish Art Salon (New York) is an open and unique inter-disciplinary group of artists. We meet informally once every four weeks to discuss our work, life, the Jewish themes inherent in our work and the multiplicity of impetus and inspiration for our work. We engage in interactive dialogues that address important and provocative issues facing our society.
We are dedicated to the preservation of an open forum where all opinions and viewpoints are listened to and respected. Together, we are working to create a Jewish art community where work and issues are discussed and information and resources are shared.
Seeing a need for such a forum, Yona Verwer, visual artist, and Holly Wolf, writer, convened the group along with co-founders Laura Kruger, curator of the HUC-JIR Museum, Richard McBee, visual artist and art critic, and David Wander, visual artist."

A PDF-version of the Kedem Auction House is available online. It includes not only a list of the 529 titles for sale but also an index and front covers of selected items.

"Kedem Auction House was established in 2008 by Meron Eren, Avishay Geller and Eran Reiss. The owners have been dealing for many years with antique Jewish books and manuscripts, and items related to the history and culture of the Jewish people. Avishay specialized in Religious books (Sifrei Kodesh) and rabbinical manuscripts, while Meron and Eran specialized in modern day Jewish history and culture." (Kedem Auction House website)

"This April 24-26, 2009, students from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia College, and the Illinois Institute of Technology will present “Chai-Art”, a collection of works exploring Jewish Identity. “Chai” (pronounced “high”) is the Hebrew word for life, and echoes the mission of Hillels Around Chicago: to foster vibrant Jewish life in a welcoming and pluralistic atmosphere.
The title also plays off the term 'High Art', often used to distinguish traditional art disciplines from craft and the decorative arts.
Student artists were asked to approach their work from a Jewish perspective. 'What does it mean to be a Jewish artist? What does it mean to be a Jew?' Explained Erin Jones, Program Director of Hillel Arts in the Loop, 'Art can be an invaluable way of processing these questions of identity and purpose.” Hillel Arts in the Loop challenges students to express their histories, ethnicities, and identities through fine arts, performance, writing, and new media.' (via JUF News)

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)

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)

(clipping from Bransten family scrapbook, Judah L Magnes Museum collections)

"The Judah L. Magnes museum is a museum of art and history focused on the Jewish experience located in Berkeley, California. Since late 2007 the museum has been posting their digital assets both on their website and on their Flickr account. On Flickr, all of the high resolution images are licensed under our [Creative Commons] Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license. [...]

More information on Creative Commons: http://creativecommons.org

Over Thirty-five Passover Haggadot will be displayed , between March 21-April 15, 2009 at Kresge Art Museum. The exhibition The Story of Exodus: The Passover Haggadah shows artifacts from the Michigan State University (MSU) libaries special collections, which contain "450,000 printed works, numerous manuscript and archival collections, and an extensive collection of ephemera." (MSU Lib.) [...] "At the MSU Main Library’s Special Collections, historically important 20th century examples will be on view, ranging from consumer-product and feminist Haggadot to those from Israeli kibbutzim.
Related events are a discussion of Geraldine Brooks’ “The People of the Book” at 5:30 p.m. April 1, led by Marc Bernstein, Jewish Studies and College of Arts and Letters, and a gallery talk on collecting Jewish heritage and illustrated Haggadot at noon April 13, led by Constance Harris, author, collector and donor of Haggadot." (MSU News)

Within the framework of the project Juedische Friedhoefe in Brandenburg, which was founded at Potsdam University (Germany) to document these important places of Jewish cultural heritage in the district of Brandenburg, comprehensive information on the Jewish cemetery of the city of Schwedt is available online now. Besides information concretely refering to the physical structure of the cemetery, the map of the cemetery, the allocation list of the tombstones and the tombstones themselves, you will also find additional information on the history of the cemetery and the Jewish community of Schwedt.
The Jewish cemeteries of Gross Neuendorf and Wriezen are also available.
For researchers the Epidat-project (temporarily under construction) at Salomon Ludwig Steinheim Institute at University of Duisburg might be also of a higher interest. (see: Blog-Post epidat - An epigraphical database of German Jewry)

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.

The (7 pages) conference proceeding of the Jahrestagung der AG Jüdische Sammlungen, written by Katrin Clever (Landschaftsverband Rheinland), is availabe on Scribd.
Besides many projects, hereunder the Virtuelle Judaica Sammlung Frankfurt, Epidat or Medaon, Dajena Schloeffel introduced the Salon Jewish Studies during that meeting to scholars, librarians, archivists and staff of Jewish museums from Austria, Switzerland and Germany.

The epidat database of the Salomon Ludwig Steinheim-Institute for German-Jewish History serves the purpose of inventory, documentation, and representation of Jewish epigraphic material. The online edition covers 13115 epitaphs from the time between 1272 and 1940. From altogether 52 corpora, 47 are from the German-Netherlandish border region (Euregion Rhein-Maas-Nord) others are from Hamburg-Altona, Frankfurt/Main and other, smaller places. The search functions on the website contain the possibility of a full-text search in all the material or within a selection of corpora. In each case the original Hebrew inscription is documented alongside a minute German translation. Names are also searchable transcripted. Partially some historic and recent photographs of the epitaphs are available next to maps, locating them on the respective cemetery. [Language: German]

lootedart.com - The Central Registry of Information on Looted Cultural Property 1933-1945 was etablished through an initiative of the Commission for Looted Art in Europe. It operates under the auspices of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. The website contains two databases:
"The Information Database contains information and documentation from forty nine countries, including laws and policies, reports and publications, archival records and resources, current cases and relevant websites. The Object Database contains details of over 25,000 objects of all kinds – paintings, drawings, antiquities, Judaica, etc – looted, missing and/or identified from over fifteen countries." (source: lootedart.com)

(picture: Gustav Klimt, Sleeping Girl, 1899)