Jewish Heritage Europe

Pipe Organs in Synagogues — Pride and Polemics. (See pix and access an article and music)

Ark in the Fabric synagogue, Timisoara, showing the organ behind and above it. Photo © Anna Szentgyörgyi

Having an organ in a synagogue is a fairly recent innovation, related to the emancipation of the Jews and spread of reform Judaism in the 19th century.  The introduction of a pipe organ into a synagogue sometimes sparked heated polemics. … continue reading →

Slovakia: Pope Francis met with Slovak Jews in a highly symbolic place: the site where Bratislava’s grand Neolog synagogue stood until the communist regime destroyed it the late 1960s. Now the site is a both a Holocaust memorial and site of Hanukkah celebrations

When Pope Francis visited Slovakia this week, he met with representatives of the Slovak Jewish community in one of the most significant and symbolic places of Jewish history in the country: Bratislava’s Rybné Square, the site where the grand, twin-towered … continue reading →

Austria: Using QR Codes to provide information on Jewish gravestones and the people they commemorate. A significant — and painstaking — project

Today’s visitors to Jewish cemeteries are often frustrated by their inability to read the Hebrew inscriptions on the gravestones. In Eisenstadt, Austria, this has been remedied by the attachment of stickers with QR codes to each matzevah in the city’s … continue reading →

Poland: App launched to help volunteers (including tourists) document “forgotten cemeteries” (of all denominations) in Poland

Poland’s Cultural Heritage Foundation, in cooperation with technology company Laboratorium EE, has launched an app aimed at encouraging (and enabling) the volunteer documentation of abandoned, neglected, and/or remote Jewish and other cemeteries in Poland and elsewhere — by tourists and other … continue reading →

Russia: Jewish heritage along the Volga River — the preliminary report from a 4,000-km research trip by the Center for Jewish Art is available online

This past Spring, researchers from the Center for Jewish Art carried out an epic, more than 4,000-kilometer journey along the Volga River researching Jewish material heritage. The preliminary, 63-page report from the trip is now available online. The team, led … continue reading →