Vandalism. Contexts, practicalities, and expectations (crosspost)

A vandal attack on the recently erected Holocaust memorial in Rajgród, a small town in northern Poland, has led Sam Gruber to consider the context of vandalism of Jewish — and other — monuments and cultural and historic sites, and what can and can’t be done to prevent such attacks.

In a lengthy post on his blog, he describes the desecration of the memorial, which was dedicated last summer at the site of the now-overgrown Jewish cemetery in Rajgród. The monument, in the form of a wall split by a crack and pierced by a Star of David, was designed by the Israeli sculptor Chen Winkler, made in Israel and shipped to Poland.

This spring, unknown perpetrators smashed the monument, including the Star of David. The damage was discovered about a month ago and since then an investigation has been ongoing.

In his blog post, Gruber considers broader implications of such vandalism, putting this destruction into the wider context of the desecration and brutalization of cultural heritage we have seen in recent times — whether in Rome by drunken soccer fans or in the Middle East by religious zealots.

There are obvious lessons to be learned from this destruction. First and foremost, commemoration of the Holocaust is not a passive or neutral event but an active present engagement of often raw and violent attitudes and emotions. Monuments are but one step on the road of commemoration. Education and engagement are ingredients in public confrontation and reconciliation with unpleasant truths about the past. As part of this process an event was already planned in Rajgród for this May 28th, when American Karen Kaplan, daughter of Holocaust survivor Arie Kaplan, and author of Descendants of Rajgrod – Learning To Forgive will be presenting the book to the town’s mayor. The violence against the monument makes Ms. Kaplan’s visit and book all the more meaningful. 

There are other more practical lessons to be learned. All public art, and especially isolated monuments – of any sort – are always at risk, for many reasons. Drunken football fans recently damaged Rome’s Barcaccia Fountain, and even artworks in well guarded museums have been defaced and even slashed. Teenagers regularly are known to topple cemetery gravestones, and countless statues in public parks across the world now stand handless and headless. Bronze plaques and even entire statues are sometimes ripped from their settings to be sold as scrap metal by those in need of quick cash. Still, while we don’t yet know the motive of the Rajgrod vandal, this seems more than youthful hijinks and a crime for gain. The violence in Rajgrod – a literal smashing attack on the symbol of Jewish resilience – is a challenge to historic truth, collective memory and continuing efforts at Jewish-Polish reconciliation. It is a special shame that such a beautifully carved and imported monument was attacked. Perhaps it was too tempting. 

Sadly, for this reason and not aesthetics, many projects in which I have been engaged or have observed have settled for nearly indestructible boulders or big blocks of stone with incised lettering. But even these get attacked – though more often with paint than with hammers.

 

We are in period where the destruction of art, monuments and historic sites for religious and ideological purpose is on the upsurge. The destruction of museums and historic sites in Iraq and Syria by ISIS is the worst instance of cultural destruction since the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, though the deliberate destruction of cultural heritage in the Holocaust was still much worse. ISIS’s ravages are certainly the worst case of religious inspired iconoclasm since the French Revolution. 

But violence against Jewish sites, especially cemeteries and Holocaust memorials, has been a ongoing problem for a long time. State sanctioned destruction of Jewish heritage sites ended with the fall of Communism but individual acts of violence that cannot by attributed to youthful high spirits regularly occur. These are deliberate – though cowardly – political acts of anti-Semitic defiance. No amount of security will stop these attacks altogether and given the number in Europe of Jewish cemetery repairs and restoration and of new Holocaust memorials, the actual number of acts of vandalism is small, but still terribly painful. For example, the Rajgród monuments was just one of seven similar projects in which the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland (FODZ) was engaged in 2014. 

Still, such acts cannot be ignored. In the case of Rajgród, and also in the recently vandalized cemetery of Gyöngyös, Hungary, these acts of violence become opportunities for governments and law enforcement to step forward to investigate and prosecute these crimes, and also to quickly repair the damage; but also opportunities for Jews and local communities to work together collaboratively through action and education to ensure that these acts are not supported and will not be representative of most people. At Gyöngyös, the vandalism led directly to a community-wide clean-up of the overgrown cemetery.

 

Read the entire blog post