A number of new books dealing with Jewish heritage have been published in recent months, in several countries and in several languages; we will be highlighting some of them.
Here are two — one (in German) on Jewish cemeteries in central Europe, and one (in Greek) on synagogues in Greece.
Haus der Ewigkeit: Jüdische Friedhöfe im mitteleuropäischen Kulturraum (House of Eternity: Jewish cemeteries in the Central European cultural area)
By Marcel-Th Jacobs and Klaus Jacobs
Hentrich & Hentrich publisher, May 2022
172 pages, hardcover
69 illustrations
ISBN: 978-3-95565-515-0
Berlin-based Marcel-Th. Jacobs and the late Klaus Jacobs spent 18 years photographing Jewish cemeteries in Germany, Poland, Ukraine and the Czech Republic. Their analog images in black and white have been exhibited in several places in Germany. The book grew out of the traveling exhibition and includes 69 of their photos, ranging from general cemetery landscapes to close details of individual gravestones.
The images are supplemented by text giving background on the Jewish communities as well as information about gravestone styles and iconography.
Click here to see the book’s page on the publisher’s web site
Η Συναγωγή (The Synagogue)
Infognomon publishing house, Athens, Greece. April 2022
In 1993, not long after he graduated from Yale University, the architect and urban planner Elias Messinas undertook the first ever architectural survey and study of the synagogues of Greece. Inspired by earlier researchers, he has written, he felt the need “to document the small number of synagogues that survived the destruction of the Shoah.”
He describes this survey project in his new book, “The Synagogue” — his third book on the synagogues of Greece.
Unlike Messinas’s previous books, the new book, he writes, “does not only present the historic and architectural background of the synagogues, it also describes the experience of traveling from city to city, and the effort to preserve the Jewish memory, through surveys, interviews and meetings with locals and Jews, some of whom have since passed away. Also included are the actual surveys of the synagogues, some of which have since been demolished.”
Read an article about the book by Messinas, in the Jerusalem Post
See the Infognomon Facebook page
The full text of one of Messinas’s previous books, The Synagogues of Greece, is accessible online. Click here to access it.