Poland -- Women's lives and history in Bialystok Jewish Cemetery

 Tombstone of Esther, daughter of R. Alperik,  in the Bialystok cemetery. The epitaph (trans. by Heidi M.Szpek) reads: "Here lies a proper, God-fearing and upright woman, [in] secrecy she performed her many righteous deeds. Our beloved and precious mother, Esther daughter of R. Aperdik. She died Tuesday 11th Tishri 5669. May her soul be bound in the bond of everlasting life. [In Russian] Estera Wolkomirskaya.. She died 24 October 1908." Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Just in time for Purim (which falls this year on Feb. 28), the scholar Heidi M. Szpek has published another fascinating article in the online Jewish Magazine on the Jewish cemetery in Bialystok.  It focuses on the women named Esther whose tombstones are found there, and what we can learn about their lives from the epitaphs and carvings.

She was important, upright, modest, and extraordinary in the performance of good deeds. She was kindhearted, pleasant, precious, and God-fearing. She was a girl, a young woman, not yet a mother, a mother, and an elderly woman. She was a martyr, a Rabbi's wife, the descendant of a prominent rabbinic lineage, the crown of her children's head, and an Eshet Hayil – a "woman of valor". Such are the virtues and character of not one Esther but of the 38 women named Esther as remembered in the extant Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian and Polish inscriptions on the Jewish tombstones in the Bagnowka Jewish Cemetery in Bialystok, Poland.

Of the over 2000 extant inscriptions, nearly half remember women (including girls). Among these women, the name Esther is rivaled only by that of Chayya and Sarah. Each time I translate the inscription of an Esther I contemplate whether Bialystok's Esthers emulate their namesake, the biblical Esther, or the rich legends of Esther preserved in rabbinic literature. ( Read full article in the online Jewish Magazine. )

 Szpek is a Professor of Religious Studies and Philosophy at Central Washington University (Ellensburg, Washington) who is currently writing a book on the Jewish epitaphs from Bialystok (I linked to another of her articles HERE). She has worked with Tomasz Wisniewski (who has posted photos and translations of the epitaphs on Bialystok Jewish tombstones on his web site www.bagnowka.com)

In her Esther article, Szpek illustrates how the imagery and inscriptions tell how women died in childbirth, or how young girls died before marriage. (For more on imagery on Jewish women's tombstones see my (Candle)sticks on Stone project.) But she also notes that women in 19th and early 20th century Bialystok fulfilled roles that went far beyond the home life of wife, mother, sister and daughter:

 Women were also nurses, social workers, administrators for Linas Hatzedek, which gave aid to the poor and sick, and for the Bialystok Relief Society. Women were students and teachers; they served in the administration of the Bialystoker Youth Society, one organized and served as 'mother' of the Bialystoker Orphans. Women were youth athletes, founders of the Maccabi Sport Club, and actresses in the Habimah Players. Women were needleworkers at the "Ort" workshops in Bialystok, active Zionists in Poale Zion and embraced the socialist ideals of the Bundists. They sat on strike committees as early as 1901, and continued to march against unfair labor practices in the 1930s. Women managed their late husbands' estates, served as leaders in the Bund, even dying in the tragic Sabbath Nahamu in July 1905 when the Tsarist Army rose up against the protesting Jewish Bundist workers.

Read full article in the online Jewish Magazine

Purim is Judaism's most joyful holiday, and Esther, of course, is its heroine. The Jewish bride of the ancient Persian King Ahasuerus, she (with her uncle Mordechai) foiled the plans of Ahasuerus' wicked advisor Haman to to annihiate the Jewish people. The story is told in the biblical book of Esther. The  scroll -- the Megillah of Esther -- is often kept in a decorative contained and is read out in the synagogue, in full, on the holiday (giving rise to the Jewish expression "the whole megillah" meaning a long and detailed account, i.e. chapter and verse.)

Another Esther figures in Polish legend -- in the 14th century King Kazimierz the Great was believed to have a Jewish mistress named Esther (or Esterka). There is an Esterka street in Krakow's old Jewish quarter, Kazimierz, and her name is associated with castles and other sites.

My latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column -- on the arson attack at the Hania synagogue

In my latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column, I discuss the implications of last week's arson attack on the synagogue in Hania, Crete.

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN
Attack on Crete synagogue carries special meaning

By Ruth Ellen Gruber · January 13, 2010

ROME (JTA) -- The vandals who torched the historic Etz Hayyim synagogue in Hania, an ancient port on the Greek island of Crete, left no doubt about their motives.

After breaking into the building on the night of Jan. 5 and setting its interior alight, they threw a bar of soap against its outer wall.

A bar of soap? That's because, explains the synagogue's director, Nikos Stavroulakis, "I'll make you into a bar of soap" is a common anti-Semitic taunt in Greece. Since the Holocaust, there has been a persistent belief that the Nazis made soap from Jewish corpses.

Even though scholars have disproved the idea, bars of soap have been buried reverently in some European Jewish cemeteries under solemn memorials.

"In this place lie the remains of Jewish martyrs exterminated by German fascists and turned into soap," reads the inscription on an obelisk in Piatra Neamt, Romania.

The power of this belief was examined in "The Soap Myth," a play by Jeff Cohen that ran last summer in New York. Based on a true story, the play focused on the efforts of an elderly Holocaust survivor "on a one-man mission to get the 'soap myth' reclassified as fact," Marissa Brostoff wrote in Tablet magazine.

But at the heart of the story was something much more.

What was at stake, Brostoff wrote, was "the way we choose to see the past, a struggle between a dispassionate approach relying on facts and figures and another, much more subjective one that holds survivors' testimonies to be unarguably true and ultimately sacred."

Anti-Semitic violence is anything but dispassionate.

The bar of soap hurled against the desecrated synagogue in Hania was a diabolically mixed metaphor: Soap usually symbolizes purity and godliness, but in this twisted context it spelled hatred and death.

The attack on the Hania synagogue was not just an assault on a building. It was an assault on the ideals that had transformed the structure from a wrecked relic of Holocaust destruction to a new symbol of community and compassion.

This transformation was accomplished largely through the efforts of Stavroulakis, a remarkable man who has devoted much of the past two decades to restoring a Jewish presence to a city made "Judenrein" by the Nazis.

I met Stavroulakis when I visited Hania in 1996. An artist, author and scholar who had co-founded and directed the Jewish Museum in Athens, Stavroulakis had returned to live in his family's rambling house in Hania after many years away.

The synagogue, which dates back to the 15th century, was in ruin. But over the next three years Stavroulakis made it his mission to raise funds and, with the help of the World Monuments Fund and other donors, oversee the building's rebirth. His aim was to make it a living spiritual presence, not simply a restored reminder of the past.

The synagogue now functions as a museum, and it hosts exhibitions and cultural events.

It’s also an active house of worship. A small Havurah community whose members include Christians and some Muslims -- as well as Jews of all persuasions -- regularly assembles there to celebrate Shabbat and Jewish holidays.

Stavroulakis himself leads daily prayers each morning, whether a minyan is present or not.

Prayers were held as usual at 9 a.m. Jan. 6, the morning after the arson attack. The fire had gutted a stairway, wreaked havoc on the synagogue library, and covered walls and precious furnishings with a thick layer of soot.

"Fortunately," Stavroulakis said, "the fabric of the synagogue was and is intact."

He was referring to the physical structure of the building, but I think he also meant that the symbolic identity of the synagogue also had survived -- and would be maintained.

"We must be angry over what has happened to our synagogue," he told the small group of worshipers gathered for prayers amid the soot. "If we were not, it would be an indication that we were either indifferent or morally numb."

But, Stavroulakis asked, just where should the anger be directed? Local indifference and the ignorance that promotes racism had to be addressed.

"We have tried at Etz Hayyim to be a small presence in the midst of what is at times almost aggressive ignorance," he wrote on the synagogue blog. "We have done this to such a degree that our doors are open from early in the morning until late in the day so that the synagogue assumes its role as a place of prayer, recollection and reconciliation."

There is, Stavroulakis wrote, little if any sign of overt security.

"This character of the synagogue must not change and the doors must remain open," he wrote. If not, that means "we have given in to the ignorance that has perpetrated this desecration."

A week after the attack, the Etz Hayyim blog posted pictures showing that thanks in large part to volunteers, the walls of the sanctuary already had been painted and other clean-up work was well under way.

"The impact of this [attack] will be wider than simply an act of terrorism against Jews," Stavroulakis told me. "Already it is being seen in a much wider social context that has to do with civic responsibility and care."

 Read story at JTA web site