Spain: Preserving Jewish heritage

Newspapers are great resources historically and for current events. Tracing the Tribe likes them for keeping up with the whereabouts of friends, such as this story about Spanish architect David Stoleru.

With Dominique Tomasov Blinder (also an architect), David is the co-founder of the Zakhor Study Center for the preservation and transmission of Jewish heritage of Spain, and of the Jewish Heritage Commission of Catalunya, both in Barcelona.

Both Dominique and David are friends from Barcelona. It was good to know that David is in Israel this year on athe Mandel Leadership Institute Program, and I will recommend that our genealogy societies arrange to have him speak.

Read more about Zakhor Center here.

Just one bone to pick with the Jerusalem Post's copy editor. View the caption to the story's illustration (right). It refers to the 1492 Edict of Expulsion as the Alabama Decree instead of the Alhambra Decree. Ever wonder how many Jews were in Alabama in 1492? [insert Smiley Face here].

The Jerusalem Post story is here.

Coming to Jerusalem by way of Barcelona, Spanish architect David Stoleru plans to educate Jews of Spanish heritage about their roots, by teaching them about the historical sites abandoned after the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492.

Stoleru, who began his fellowship at the Mandel Leadership Institute program in September, told The Jerusalem Post on Monday that during his year in Jerusalem, he hopes to promote understanding and leadership in Jewish communities around Spain and throughout the world.

"My idea in this project is to develop a concept of using these sites that show off the Jewish heritage in Spain as well as sites throughout Europe, and teach these Jews about their roots," he said.

He has worked to preserve the ancient Jewish cemetery and structures in the old city of Toledo from around the 13th century as well as the ancient cemetery of Montjuic in Barcelona. The Center's involvement in Montjuic led to Catalunya declaring it a national heritage site.

"There were no Jewish communities throughout Spain more than 500 years ago," he said. "In general, the Jews of Spain began their relationship with Judaism completely outside the strong anti-Semitism seen in Spain in the past. Most of their knowledge comes from the outside world, from people asking question and telling stories about their roots in Judaism."

An award-winning architect, Stoleru took part in the Jewish Young Leadership Seminary of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, founded the Talmudic Studies Circle in Barcelona and is a researcher and teacher of Spain's Jewish heritage.

"Restorative architecture is an important educational act," Stoleru said. "The connection to the historical heritage, especially in the context of the Spanish Jews, raises moral and educational questions.
"For me, architecture is a means to create an educational and cultural dialogue," he said.

The Mandel Leadership Institute fellowship program is in its 27th year.

Read the complete story at the link above.

Auschwitz: Yad Vashem receives original plans

Yad Vashem (Jerusalem) will receive the original plans for Auschwitz in Berlin on Thursday.

The German newspaper, Bild, acquired the architectural plans and decided to donate them to Yad Vashem.

The blueprints were discovered in 2008, and Bild editor-in-chief Kai Diekmann decided that Yad Vashem was the most appropriate place to safeguard them. In January 2010, the plans will be displayed, marking 65 years since the camp's liberation.

There are 29 documents in the collection. The plans show details for expanding the camp, including the addition of a crematorium and a gas chamber.

They are dated between 1941 and 1943, and have been authenticated by experts from Germany's Federal Archives. Discovered last year in Berlin, and acquired by the German newspaper Bild, the sketches include plans for a purification building, with a gas chamber, dated 8 November 1941 (the building was never built); Crematorium II + III from November 1941; a plan for a building to contain corpses; a two-dimensional sketch of the now-iconic entry way to the Birkenau death camp; a sketch from 30 April 1942 for plans to expand Auschwitz I (plans which were partially completed); an initial plan for Birkenau from October 1941; and a plan for a huge headquarters building (dated 17 December 1941), that was never carried out. Some of the documents bear notes in the margins, or signatures by senior Nazis, including Himmler. Copies of some of these documents exist in other archives, and were previously known, but as a whole these are significant historical records.

Yad Vashem's archives currently hold more than 125 million pages of Holocaust documentation.

1929: Jewish buildings unbuilt

Prior to the Great Depression of 1929, one could say that euphoria was rampant in American Jewish life, so writes Diana Muir Appelbaum in her latest Tablet Magazine article.

In the irrational exuberance of 1928, everything seemed possible. Boards of directors could plan enormous synagogues in glistening white stone to rival the Parthenon. Academic dreamers could design a great Jewish university with towers, courtyards, and gardens to challenge the magnificence of Princeton or Oxford. No ambition was too large, no plan too expensive. One had only to hire an architect, draw an elegant façade, and watch the building fund fill. Then, in October, 1929, the great building boom ended with a crash, leaving magnificent synagogues on architects’ drawing boards, forever unbuilt. It all feels very 2008. What follows is a glimpse at some of the more ambitious plans and what, ultimately, became of them.

The article has some great archival plans, renderings and photos of these mega-magnificents.

The story details Boston's Temple Israel, Kehillat Israel and Mishkan Tefillah, as well as the Great Central Synagogue and the city's oldest congregation Ohabai Shalom. Appelbaum details Temple Israel's plans which echo Jefferson's idea for the University of Virginia's main building.

In the architect’s drawing, the four-columned meetinghouse and school building, in use since 1927, are shaded grey. None of the other 22 columns in the plan were ever erected, nor were the buildings that would have risen behind them. In the 1960s, Temple Israel built a spacious, modern sanctuary beside the classical Meeting House of the 1927 plan.

In New York, she writes, the most ambitious plan of the decade was the main campus of Yeshiva College in Washington Heights. Previously, US universities were Gothic in design, while some went with Classical (Virginia's Medical College walked like an Egyptian). Columbia University went Renaissance.

Since Jewish scholarship was older than Gothic, Classic or Renaissance, it needed something else, and the plans of architect Henry Beaumont Herts were designed to cover several centuries BCE.

The campus that emerged from Herts’s drawing-board was an exotic world of courtyards, arches, towers, and domes calculated to put Columbia, Princeton, and Yale to shame and satisfy the most romantic soul ever to dream of life in the Ivory Tower. This particular rendition of the ivied campus dream was the Arabian Nights. The domes were Ottoman, the arches Moorish, and all the towers were minarets.

In the midwest, Temple Mizpah (Chicao) planned a domed, Byzantine synagogue. Only the Hebrew School was built.

Congregation Shaarey Zedek (Detroit) also went Byzantine but on a small scale. They wanted a $750,000 campus, with gym, library, school, offices, chapel, auditorium, banquet hall for 1,200, small sanctuary for 500, main sanctuary for 2,500. What they got was a no-frills (and no gym) $300,000 Byzantine building. When it moved to the suburbs in 1962, it did get a futurist design.

Art Deco and lions were on the grandiose plans for Chicago's Congregation Anshe Emet. All it got was a renovation adding space to pray in the old Hebrew School.

Closer to home - in my case, Brooklyn - was Union Temple's Classic design with an eight-story Hebrew School, the only part finished before the crash. It did, however, get a renovated auditorium for a sanctuary.

Read the complete article and view the historic plans and photographs at the link above.

California: Berkeley's Jewish pioneers

There are so many sources to consult when detailing the genealogy of a person or a family. Don't forget real estate records, university yearbooks, newspapers and a range of other records, as demonstrated in this story on Berkeley's Jewish history.

The story, focusing on the pioneering Fischel family, by Daniella Thompson, appeared in the Berkeley Daily Planet. She also publishes Berkeley Heritage for the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association (BAHA).

Among the fortune seekers lured to northern California by the Gold Rush, the Jewish contingent was small but significant. Jewish immigrants would go on to play an important role in the economic and cultural development of the Bay Area, and Berkeley was no exception. Although early accounts rarely discuss Berkeley’s Jewish community, some members figured among the young town’s prominent citizens.

The story centers on a pioneering family - Fischel - which arrived in Berkeley in the late 1870s, and began buying property and building.

Simon Fischel immigrated from Bohemia, then a Crown Land of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Born in 1846 or 1847 (depending on source), he arrived in New York as a teenager in 1865, worked as a butcher for more than 10 years, and became a citizen in 1872. He married Rosa Bauml in 1870 and their first four children were born in New York. Around 1878, they arrived in Berkeley and are listed in the 1879 city directory.

The story thoroughly details the family using such resources as census records, building records, university yearbooks, newspaper advertisements and articles.

On Nov. 6, 1890, the Berkeley Advocate regaled its readers with this anecdote: “A lady called on Fischel & Co. the other evening and made arrangements for that company to supply her family with meat. The team was daily sent to the house, when it was discovered that no such family resided there. It turned out that Mr. Fischel was deceived of a young man who donned the garment of a virgin to fool Fischel.”

Fischel wasn't a kosher butcher, as he sold pork, but he was involved in the First Hebrew Congregation of Oakland, founded by Gold Rush-era settlers.

The story follows their real estate ventures recorded in the Berkeley Advocate and elsewhere. Among his properties was the Fischel Block (1888) on the northwest corner of Shattuck and University.

It was by far the most elegant building on the intersection, adorned with bay windows along the second floor, showy corbels under the eaves, a decorative metal railing along the roofline, and an impressive corner turret crowned by a witch’s cap.

Then whole clan seems to have been living in the area. Simon's brother Isaac and his wife Elsie built his family home next door to Simon, bought other property and built a rental house, but died early; brother-in-law Jacob and Lilly Bauml built a few doors west.

Simon bought more lots and built more houses which survived until 1955. The story details the deaths of Simon and his wife, and newspaper obituaries for both, a well as continuing commercial activities of other family members.

Elsie Fischel's 1890 house was purchased several years ago and restored - the recipient of a 2008 Preservation Award from the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association (BAHA).

Read the complete story here.