(JHE) — The towns of Sighetul Marmatiei (Sighet) Romania and Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine are sharing an EU grant to rehabilitate selected Jewish heritage sites and promote cross-border Jewish heritage-themed tourism.
The EU’s 2014-2020 Hungary-Slovakia-Romania-Ukraine ENI Cross-border Cooperation Program announced in January it was awarding a total of €258,982.04 to be split between the two towns in a project called “JCulture: Research and preservation of Jewish cultural heritage in the border area.”
Sighet, in northwestern Romania, lies on the border with Ukraine, about 180 km south of Ivano-Frankivsk.
JCulture’s partners are the Ivano-Frankivsk city council and the Maramures Museum in Sighet, one of whose branches is the memorial museum housed in the childhood home of the Holocaust survivor and Nobel prize-winner Elie Wiesel. The Jewish communities in the two towns were not partners in the grant.
The project has three dimensions, all to be implemented in both towns, Alina Marincean, the curator of the Elie Wiesel House told JHE. These include :
- restoration of a heritage site;
- organizing a Jewish culture festival;
- and creating a Jewish heritage itinerary, both onsite and via an online app.
With the Maramures museum as a partner, Marincean said, the heritage sites covered by the project will be the Elie Wiesel Museum itself and also two formerly Jewish houses now part of the village museum (skansen) section of the Maramures Museum complex.
In the Elie Wiesel museum, she said, works will include renovation of the interior and exterior walls, painting the doors and windows, repair work on the roof, bathroom, and drainage system, and creating an outdoor space for reflection. new exhibition panels will be mounted, sun protection panels for the windows will be installed, as well as an exhibition lightning system for the museum and outdoor night lightning.
The JCulture heritage site in Ivano-Frankivsk will be the Tempel synagogue, built in 1894-99, which suffered damage from water infiltration last year that threatened its structural integrity. The Jewish community and allies launched a fund-raising campaign last summer which raised enough funds to carry out emergency repairs in November and December.
Built for the progressive Jewish community, the synagogue was a monumental building with four onion dome-topped towers, designed by the noted Vienna-based architect Wilhelm Stiassny. The towers were removed at some point, either during or after WW2.
In a Facebook post, Ivano Frankivsk mayor Ruslan Martsinkiv said the JCulture grant would fund installation of [outdoor] lighting and repair of drainage. Further details were not immediately available.
In both Sighet and Ivano-Frankivsk, the tourism targets of the JCulture grant will entail placing informational panels in each town about Jewish heritage and personalities, to form a Jewish heritage trail.
And each town is to organize a Jewish culture festival featuring performances, workshops, music, nighttime tours, and other activities.
There are small Jewish communities in both Sighet and Ivano-Frankivsk. Marincean said that they will play a tangential role in the project as stakeholders, but will not directly be involved in the implementation, given the terms of the grant, whose recipients and lead partners are civic bodies.
JHE has been informed that according to the Jewish community in Ivano-Frankivsk, none of the EU grant will go toward funding a fuller restoration of the synagogue. JHE was also informed that the community has expressed concern at the accuracy of contents and wording of the city’s planned information panels. (We wrote about concerns raised over signage wording in another EU-funded Jewish heritage tourism project in Romania.)
The JCulture grant is the latest of several cross-border EU grants promoting Jewish heritage tourism in places where there are either small Jewish communities or where no Jews live today. Others project include the Rediscover project in nine cities in eight countries in east-central Europe; the Shtetl Routes project in the borderlands areas of Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine; the trail between Jewish cemeteries in the remote towns of Biala, Poland and Osoblaha, Czech Republic; and the restoration of synagogue buildings in Oradea, Romania and Debrecen, Hungary.
Read report on the Ivano-Frankivsk synagogue and 2020 crowd-funded repairs
See documentation of the Ivano-Frankivsk synagogue by Center for Jewish Art
Web page for the Elie Wiesel memorial house in Sighet’s Maramures Museum