We fill preexisting forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed.
-Frank Bidart
-Frank Bidart
I was fortunate enough to take part this afternoon in a brief action organized by a group of local and international Jewish activists, artists, and scholars. Together we reclaimed the historic yeshiva and synagogue Beit Midrash Hevre Tehillim, here in the heart of old Jewish Kazimierz, and hopefully prompted a challenging and necessary conversation about Jewish heritage in today's Poland. Some context: In 1896, a Jewish prayer and study space named Beit Midrash Hevre Tehillim opened at the intersection of Meisels street, named after the influential Polish rabbi Dov Ber Meisels, and Bozego Ciala street, Polish for "the body of Christ." This space, in other words, exists at the symbolic convergence of Krakow's Jewish and Catholic heritages. Between its founding and the 1930's, the Beit Midrash Hevre Tehillim was painted with a series of ornate and beautiful wall frescoes. Though heavily degraded today, these frescoes still stand as one of Poland's best surviving examples of original synagogue art. You can get the idea from this small detail of a Jerusalem frescoe, but the walls of the synagogue are filled with such decaying and glorious art: Check out Sam Gruber's Jewish Monuments blog for a more in-depth look at Beit Midrash Hevre Tehillim's art and symbolism. The name Beit Midrash Hevre Tehillim is Hebrew for House of Study Society of Psalms, and this namesake was connected with the community's particular distinction: every day, as part of their morning prayer and study, the members of Beit Midrash Hevre Tehillim recited the book of Psalms in its entirety. But this tradition died out with its practitioners not long after the Nazis moved Krakow's Jews across the Vistula river, into a ghetto in the Podgorze neighborhood. By the end of World War II, most of the members of Beit Midrash Hevre Tehillim had been murdered, and their beautiful building entered a second life as a dance studio. In 1997, however, a Polish law passed allowing, and in some cases requiring, the restitution of Jewish property. Beit Midrash Hevre Tehillim was returned to Krakow's official Jewish community, and sat in disuse until a bar and dance club called Mezcal leased the building in 2013. Today the site has changed hands again, and is the home of a newly-opened and decidedly cool bar called, of all things, Hevre. Why has the Jewish community leased this space for secular businesses? The story is complicated, and involves political and economic machinations both too convoluted and too cynical to attempt recounting. But it's worth noting that Krakow's progressive Jewish community recently submitted a proposal to take over the building's lease, and raised a considerable amount of money to do so. This proposal was rejected, and the lease was given instead to the operators of one of Krakow's trendiest bar and restaurant groups. They wasted little time renovating the building, and in the process the historic and beautiful decorations around the aron kodesh, the place on the synagogue's eastern wall which once held Torah scrolls, was irrevocably damaged. So all of this, as it must, brings us to today. Hevre opened a few weeks ago to great fanfare, and here is the space as it looks now, with glass doors on the photograph's left side where the aron kodesh once stood: Along with over 2 dozen people, I showed up at the Hevre bar/coffeeshop, née Beit Midrash Hevre Tehillim, at 2:30 this afternoon. We filled the whole space as we listened to chanting from the book of Psalms, and then we milled through the bar reading Psalms out loud. For the first time since the Holocaust, Beit Midrash Hevre Tehillim was alive with the sound of Biblical Hebrew poetry. Hevre's patrons looked on with bemusement and respect, and the staff actually turned their sound system off for the duration of our psalm recitation.
So what now? After several minutes, our group left, the pop music returned, and Beit Midrash Hevre Tehillim was once again a bar called Hevre, wearing its past on the walls like an incongruous costume. As one participant said, it felt like we were simultaneously invading a space that did not belong to us, and reclaiming a space that had been unjustly taken. I'm optimistic, however, that actions and interventions like this can change the conversation about Jewish heritage and historical Jewish spaces in today's Poland. Instead of allowing the whims of the market to dictate the legacy of Polish Judaism, we claimed a place as that legacy's inheritors and as such insisted on our right to interpret Krakow's Jewish past, and to shape Krakow's Jewish future. What will this change? Maybe nothing, or maybe it's the glimmer of a new conversation about the use and misuse of Jewish heritage. But either way, for even a few minutes, a historical Jewish space was reclaimed by the psalms that enlivened it before the Holocaust, and by the people committed to the preservation of Krakow's Jewish culture. Beneath that degraded fresco of Jerusalem, and in a place that has seen so much Jewish death and destruction, I couldn't help but think of the book of Jeremiah: "It will again be heard in this place, about which you say that it is a wasteland... and in the streets of Jerusalem, that are desolate without inhabitant... the sound of joy and the sound of happiness."
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In ecology an "ecotone" is that region at the intersection of different biomes, where a grassland and a forest meet, for example. The etymology of ecotone is telling: from the English eco, as in ecology, and the Greek τόνος, tonos, meaning tension. But ecologists know ecotones to be places, along with their tensions, of tremendous diversity and vitality. What do those ecotones look like at the borders of Judaism? Through words and stray photographs, that's the question I hope to use this space to explore.
I've been thinking for a while of making an online home for some of my writings and photographs. I'm interested, above all, in those liminal spaces where worlds collide: the trace of a mezuzah on a doorpost in a little Polish village, or Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe kidnapped by Comanche warriors on American's southern great plains. Those unexpected moments, in other words, where distant times and places converge. Comment on posts or send an email with thoughts, questions, reflections, etc: I'd love to start a conversation. The old Jewish cemetery in Warsaw was first used in 1806, and today holds a quarter million marked tombs on over 80 acres of land. Across much of Eastern Europe, Jewish graves were designed as sculptures with a complex, symbolic language in order to memorialize their dead. A philanthropist's tombstone, for example, was often engraved with the image of a hand dropping coins into a pushke: Those graves with a kind of proto-Vulcan salute are the burial places of kohanim, Jewish men descended from the Israelite priestly class. Leonard Nimoy was inspired to create this salute by memories of the birkat hakohanim, the traditional priestly blessing, he had seen in synagogues as a child. The shape of the fingers in this gesture represents the Hebrew letter shin, the first letter in one of the names of God, and according to certain mystical folk traditions the light of the Divine Presence shines through the kohen's fingers when he raises them in this gesture and recites the appropriate blessings. Of course, among the most prestigious roles a man could have in Jewish culture was, and still is, that of a scholar. The graves of rabbis, and of particularly learned laymen, were often inscribed with bookshelves as symbols of study. The graves of the descendants of Levites feature a water pitcher, a reference to the Levite responsibility of washing the hands of priests before sacrificial service. If you can't read Hebrew, any guesses what communal role the following gravestone symbolizes? Hint: that's supposed to be a hand holding a knife. Of course, these are just some examples of the very diverse and very complex Jewish gravestone design across Eastern Europe. I'll update with more photos, and hopefully highlight in particular the beautiful regional art of Galician Jewish cemeteries, many of which were traditionally painted with vibrant colors.
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