The world’s largest and most expensive Jewish Museum opened to great fanfare in Russia late last year. And although it has only been open for less than six months, the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow has become a must-see for any visitors to the Russian capital.

A high profile project, its construction cost around $50 million, to which Russian President Vladimir Putin donated a month’s wages. Israeli President Shimon Peres, who was born in what is now Belarus, flew to Moscow for the museum’s opening in November 2012.

There the 89-year-old Israeli leader told reporters that, “My mother sang to me in Russian, and at the entrance to this museum, memories of my childhood flooded through my mind, and my mother’s voice played in my heart.”

The history of the Jews in Russia is as complex and emotional as any childhood memories.

This large and engaging museum—which was primarily funded by oligarchs with close ties to the Kremlin—is dedicated to the ambivalent history of Jews in Russia, land that has been the site of both immense Jewish achievement and suffering.

“We tried to make our museum not about how bad or how good it was to be a Jew in Russia, but simply about how it was,” said Borukh Gorin, the chairman of the museum, according to the Los Angeles Times.

To tell the tale, the museum has adopted a very modern approach. It employs interactive displays with personal testimony and archival footage in both Russian and English.

New York based designer Ralph Appelbaum, who designed the United States Holocaust Museum, created a museum that the Russian online television channel Dozhd described as a “Jewish Disneyland.”

As befits a major museum, it occupies a vast space—some 5,000 square feet. Across this floor space the museum offers visitors an array of interactive exhibits. Films in 3-D, interactive maps and touch screens all chronicle Jewish life in what was once the Russian Empire.

A visitor can touch a screen at one exhibit and appear in a mirror dressed in the garb of a 19th-century blacksmith, or a merchant, or a Russian-Jewish intellectual. If you touch a Torah in a virtual synagogue, the cantor’s voice fills the air.

The exhibitions are presented in chronological order. As visitors progress through the museum, they follow in the path of centuries of Russian Jewry, travelling across medieval Europe to the Russian Empire’s Pale of Settlement and then onto Russian cities.

The Jewish presence in Russia grew as a result of Russia, Prussia and Austria’s division of Poland at the end of the 1700s. Along with the Polish territory it gained, the Russian Empire inherited approximately 1 million Jews. Most of the Jewish population was densely concentrated in rural areas in the north and west of the Russian Empire. Later Tsarist decrees forbade Jews from settling outside of a prescribed area, known as the Pale of Settlement.

Individual Jews had to apply for permission to live outside of the Pale (from where we get the expression, “beyond the pale”), applications which were almost always denied. As the Russian Empire expanded, especially south into the area known as New Russia (southern Ukraine), Jews were permitted to settle in this new terrain, which included the city of Odessa. The Ukrainian port soon became the center of flourishing Jewish life, one of the major Jewish centers of the world.

Visitors to the museum can sit down at a café in Odessa and interact with a virtual, dead Jewish writer, a representative member of the city’s intelligentsia.

In addition to conversation with long-dead authors, a visitor can partake in other interactive role-play at the Odessa café. By touching the table, the visitor is posed a question that was all-too pertinent for many Jewish residents of Odessa in the 19th and 20th centuries.

“If your store were destroyed by a pogrom, what would you do?”

The question is a good one, not merely hypothetical. Odessa was the site of pogroms in 1821, 1859, 1871, 1881, 1886 and 1905. Visitors can choose from one of four responses:

“A) Give up and emigrate to the West, B) Stay in my hometown and try to rebuild the store, C) Join a Jewish self-defense league and prepare for the next pogrom or, D) I am still in shock.”

As it happens, Vladimir Jabotinsky, a resident of the city on the Black Sea, chose option C. In the midst of the anti-Jewish violence, Jabotinsky created the Jewish Self-Defense Organization, a Jewish militant group whose purpose was to safeguard Jews from attack in Odessa and throughout the Russian Empire.

Jabotinsky became convinced that the only ways for Jews to be free from the threat of violence was to be armed— “better to have a gun and not need it than to need it and not have it!” he said—or, better yet, to live in their own country, the state of Israel.

Jabotinsky became a prominent Zionist, changed his name from Vladimir to Ze’ev, and founded the Revisionist Zionist movement. Jabotinksy died in New York in 1940, before his dream of a Jewish homeland was realized, but after the establishment of the Jewish State, his remains were transferred to Israel.

In addition to contributing to the development of Zionism, the bloody pogroms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries resulted in the mass emigration of Russian Jews to the West—the United States, primarily, but also France, the United Kingdom and Germany—and to pre-State Palestine. Then in 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution granted equal rights to all minority groups in Russia, including Jews, while it also precipitated more anti-Jewish violence.

The museum outlines these periods, as well as the Holocaust. While the Shoah is by no means the primary focus of the museum, exhibitions detail some of the horrors in which over 2.5 million Russian Jews were murdered. Yet while many Russian Jews perished at the hands of Nazis and their collaborators, Russian Jews fighting in the Soviet Army also helped to liberate concentration camps. Once again, Jewish suffering and success are starkly juxtaposed.

The museum chronicles the Jewish contribution to Russia’s war effort during World War II. It houses a copy of a T-34 tank, which was made in a plant run by a Jewish man in the Urals town of Nizhny Tagil and served as the Russian army’s primary tank during the war. The museum also honors Russia’s only female Jewish air force pilot, who received the Hero of the Soviet Union award, with a reproduction of the plane she flew during the war.

Exhibitions also address the post-War period, exploring what it meant to be a Soviet Jew. This section of the museum might be of particular interest to the many Russian-speaking Jews who left the former Soviet Union. There are now hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of Russian-speaking Jews and their families who live in Israel, the United States, Germany and elsewhere outside of Russia.

While many Russian Jews desperately fought to leave the Soviet Union, hoping to immigrate to Israel for ideological reasons—part of the refusenik movement—or to the West, the museum also profiles the many and varied contributions of Russian Jews to the development of the Soviet Union in the fields of politics, literature, engineering, mathematics, literature and the arts.

At the start of the 20th century, Russia was home to the largest Jewish population in the world, perhaps as many as 5 million souls. But anti-Jewish violence and legislation led to mass emigration from Russia—to primarily to the United States, pre-State Israel and Western Europe. Then the Nazi genocide further decimated Jewish communities. After the defeat of the Nazis, Soviet authorities repressed Jewish religious and cultural life, as well as other religions. In the wake of the break down of the Soviet Union, yet more Russian Jews left the country for Israel and the West. These events radically cut the size of Russia’s Jewish population, which currently numbers approximately 200,000.

Although there may be fewer Jews in Russia than at any point in over 200 years, Moscow is now home to an impressive museum—earlier this month, the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center received the “Museum of the Year” award from the Russia edition of the prestigious The Art Newspaper, the Jewish Telegraph Agency reported.

So many of the world’s Jews, from Nobel laureate and Israeli President Shimon Peres down, can trace their families’ histories to Russia. It is fitting that this major museum honors the heritage of a huge proportion of the world’s Jews and the inextricably intertwined modern histories of Jewish people and Russian lands.

The slogans “Heil Hitler,” “Jews out” in German and a swastika were scrawled on the pavement near the HKP 562 labor camp in Vilnius, AFP reported. The graffiti was discovered April 22, two days after Adolf Hitler’s birthday.

“It is especially horrific that these anti-Semitic slogans appeared near two historically sensitive sites for the Jewish nation,” said Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius.

On April 23, the Lithuanian government approved a special program of events to mark the 70th anniversary of the liquidation of the Vilnius ghetto. The proceedings are scheduled for September.

The award was presented to the museum’s chairman, Boruch Gorin, last week at a ceremony in the Russian capital.

The monthly’s Russian edition, the most recent addition to an international network of newspapers founded in Turin in 1983, selected the Jewish museum as the winner of its main category. Other categories included Exhibition of the Year, Book of the Year, Restoration of the Year and personal contribution.

The Jewish museum opened in November at a cost of approximately $50 million, according to a report by Russia’s Jewish News Agency. The structure was co-designed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates, which also designed the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. It offers 3-D films, interactive maps and touch screens.

The gravestones will be transferred to the only remaining Jewish cemetery in the area.

Below is a translation of the letter Meylakh Sheykhet sent to the mayor of Lviv regarding a variety of issues involving Jewish cultural preservation, including the use of headstones as pavement:

Mr. Andriy Sadovy    

Mayor of Lviv

February 18, 2013

Dear Mr. Sadovy:

In response to your letter dated December 13, 2012 we would like to state the following:

On April 23, 2010 the Lviv City Council Executive Committee issued Decision No. 446 wherein it resolved to carry out the International Design Competition for Sites of Jewish History in Lviv in order to “motivate to reconsider and represent the important places in Lviv connected with the history of the Jewish community as part of a multicultural heritage of the city.”

Decision No. 446 is illegal as it involves land issues for the abovementioned places that can be decided upon exclusively by the elected members of the Lviv City Council.

In addition to the Lviv City Council Executive Committee the following organizers of the International Design Competition for Sites of Jewish History in Lviv were announced at a public hearing: Ukrainian-German project entitled Municipal Development and Rehabilitation of the Old City of Lviv jointly executed by the Lviv City Administration and German Society for International Cooperation GTZ (headquartered at the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe, Bohomoltsya 6 St., Lviv).

Decision No. 446 of the Lviv City Council Executive Committee was adopted in spite of its contents, which stated that the responsibility for the implementation of the competition was assigned to the Executive Committee, but during the public hearing, contrary to this, the responsibility for the competition was assigned to Sofiya Dyak, project coordinator at the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe.

As seen from the text of the Decision, the legal basis of the competition was grounded in the municipal regulations of the Lviv City Council Executive Committee, without providing justification for this decision from relevant substantive law of Ukraine and international agreements, including the Agreement with UNESCO for the preservation of Ensemble of the Historic City Centre that had been inscribed in the World Heritage List.

The Lviv City Council Executive Committee breached the competition procedure in several ways:

1. The pre-requisite conditions of the competition were not agreed with the Department of Cultural Heritage of the Lviv Regional State Administration, the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine and the UNESCO World Heritage Centre in Paris, France and with the Jewish community of Lviv and the world.
2. Contrary to the Decision No. 446 the Lviv City Council Executive Committee removed itself from liability for the competition, delegating the powers to a foreign organization that has not been designated by any authority in the Decision No. 446.
3. The requirements mentioned in points 1.1 … 1.4,2.2 … 2.3, 3.1 … 3.15 of the Decree No. 231/806 dated November 30, 2004 by the State Committee of Ukraine on Building and Architecture at the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine were not kept.
4. The Law of Ukraine on Architectural Activity as well as the Regulation for the Organization of Competitions was not taken into account in the Decision No. 466 of the Lviv City Council Executive Committee.
5. The competition lacks important provisions:

5.1     Restrictions according to the special status of areas inscribed into the UNESCO World Heritage List.

5.2     Special status of the land of burial sites at the Old Jewish Cemetery (Krakivsky market), places of mass execution by the German Nazis and the territory of the Yanivsky Camp, as recognized by the laws of Ukraine, international agreements between Ukraine and the United States as of March 4, 1994, the Vienna Convention 1969.

At the public hearing, the members of the City Council and Executive Committee, the Ukrainian community leaders, and representatives of the Jewish community of Lviv stated that the international competition and the way it was organized did not comply with the laws of Ukraine and international agreements, the interests of preserving the Jewish heritage in Lviv. It was stated that this competition had become a misrepresentation of historical truth, illegal appropriation of land, illegal granting of land to be used for the trading lots of the Krakivsky market and to build a hotel on Fedorova St. – the land, which belongs to the Lviv community – through unlawful delegation of crucial powers to foreign organizations, namely the German Technical Cooperation GTZ, project for the Municipal Development and Rehabilitation of the Old City of Lviv (Center for Urban History of East Central Europe, Bohomoltsya 6 St., Lviv).

The question of proper preservation of the cultural heritage is regulated not only by the above-mentioned provisions of the substantive law and international agreements, but also by the Protocol of 1996 following a meeting in Lviv, recommendations of USAID and the Government of Ukraine Decree dated December 21, 2010 and the Vienna Convention 1969.

However, despite the need for implementation of the grant of the U.S. Embassy, ​​the Lviv City Council organized a controversial competition, disregarding the existence of the U.S. Ambassador grant for scientific research in this same area of ​​the medieval Jewish district of Lviv on 23-27, 28 Fedorova Street. Thus, the Lviv City Council turned a blind eye to the ongoing international cooperation in the project under the US Ambassador Grant, ​​abandoning substantial assistance to the city of Lviv in the study and restoration of the medieval Jewish Quarter, and ignoring the decision of the Government of Ukraine and the request of UNESCO.

In view of the activities of the German Technical Cooperation GTZ, project for the Municipal Development and Rehabilitation of the Old City of Lviv and Center for Urban History of East Central Europe, at 6 Bohomoltsya St., Lviv – the decision to delegate them the powers of the Lviv City Council Executive Committee has translated into a conflict of interests – a situation that contradicts the Rule of Law in Ukraine and its international agreements.

The Lviv City Council Executive Committee continues to ignore the need to honor the memorial places of the Jewish people in Lviv and the surrounding, tortured by the Holocaust, namely:

1. The Old Jewish Cemetery continues to be used at the behest of the Lviv City Council Executive Committee as a market place – the Krakivsky market – despite the status of this land as a burial site that forbids privatization and misuse of such land. Moreover, the Lviv City Council Executive Committee ignores the Decree of the Central Government dated December 21, 2012 – issued by the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine concerning the inscription of the Old Jewish Cemetery in Lviv into the National Register of Monuments of Ukraine as a historical monument of local importance.
2. The Lviv City Council Executive Committee continues to defend in court the illegal construction of the hotel on the Fedorova St. 23-28, ignoring legislation and international agreements of Ukraine, requirements of the World Heritage Centre in Paris, ignoring the unique surviving synagogue building complex Turei Zahav, built during 16^th -18^th century and not facilitating their authentic preservation. The construction of the hotel, if it were to happen, would ruin – with its physical weight, communication requirements and historical architectural disharmony – the historic environment and the remnants of Turei Zahav (Golden Rose) Synagogue.
3. At the Citadel – Concentration Camp Shtalag-328, the site of the Tower of Death, where the German Nazis killed 20 000 Jews, among many other POWs from the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition – now operates a fashionable restaurant and other recreational facilities, disharmonious to this memorial site.
4. Regarding the mass graves in Bilohorshcha, Lysynychi, Vynnyky, Brukhovychi, in Lviv on Pasichna Street – the Lviv City Council Executive Committee did not give any positive response to the documents submitted by our organization.
5. With the acquiescence of the Lviv City Council Executive Committee there is an anti-Semitic “Jewish tavern” called At the Golden Rose and an anti-Ukrainian restaurant Kryivka.

Your references to the untidiness of the territory of the local Jewish history only emphasize the idleness on the part of the Lviv City Council Executive Committee in ensuring proper care for the historic sites (which does not cost so much) because timely and proper cleaning, monitoring respect for the parking ban on the holy memorial site of the Great Synagogue on Arsenalna square and other areas are part and parcel of the public utility services of the city. Actions of the Lviv City Council Executive Committee must clearly meet all the substantive law of Ukraine and international agreements in the field of preservation of historical and cultural heritage.

Hence we request you to:

1. Consider this letter and provide an answer based on the legislation of Ukraine and international agreements, the requirements of UNESCO.

2. Void the Decision No. 446 dated April 23, 2010 of the Lviv City Council Executive Committee.

Yours faithfully,

Meylakh Sheykhet

Director

The vibrant Jewish culture and the spiritual life of the Ukrainian Jewish community in Lviv, Ukraine, much like elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, had been ruthlessly suppressed by the Nazi and Communist totalitarian dictatorships for many years. At present, there are only a handful of institutions doing what we do – preserving and sharing the wonderful examples of the Ukrainian Jewish culture. That is why it is so important that we carry on this important work and receive the support of people who care. Through field and archival research, exhibitions, lectures, gatherings, conferences and workshops touching upon the various aspects of the Jewish culture, history, and life, we seek to reach out to the wider public in order to highlight the richness and complexity of the Ukrainian Jewish legacy, to rediscover the forgotten local Jewish heritage and to preserve the lasting memory of it.

We welcome your support and invite you to contact us without hesitation so that together we can work on exciting projects for the sake of preserving and promoting the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity.

With very best wishes,

Meylakh Sheykhet

Director, L’viv, Ukraine Bureau

Presentation of UCSJ’s work to preserve Jewish Heritage in Ukraine.

Israeli President Shimon Peres, born in Belarus, said at the opening ceremony, “My mother sang to me in Russian, and at the entrance to this museum, memories of my childhood flooded through my mind, and my mother’s voice played in my heart. I came here to say thank you.” Other visitors stated that their parents, who left Russia during the 1970’s, simply could not believe that such a museum now existed in Moscow.

The complex’s state-of-the-art design features interactive galleries that bring the visitor into the world of Russian Jews at a specific period in time. The NY Times reports, “Touch the screen in one exhibit in this vast building and a visitor can appear in a mirror dressed in the garb of a 19th-century blacksmith, or a trader or a ‘representative of the intelligentsia.’ Tap a Torah in a virtual synagogue, and a cantor’s voice rings in the air. In a virtual Odessa, one can sit down in an interactive cafe to chat with long-dead writers.”

The museum does not shy away from the darker periods of time for Russian Jews– the Odessa cafe exhibit includes touch-screen tables that ask the question “If your store were destroyed by a pogrom, what would you do? A) Give up and emigrate to the West, B) Stay in my hometown and try to rebuild the store, C) Join a Jewish self-defense league and prepare for the next pogrom or, D) I am still in shock.”

Despite the many positive reactions to this new, $50-million museum (that was partially funded by President Putin), the LA Times points out that this does not put to rest problems surrounding the surge of racist nationalism in Russia. A week ago, thousands of nationalists marched throughout Moscow denouncing Jews, Masons and various other ethnic, religious and social groups, many wearing black hoods and high boots.

The dedication ceremony included Jewish leaders from Ukraine, Russia, other former states of the Soviet Union and many Israeli officials. The president of the Jewish Communities of the Commonwealth of Independent States was also present.

The Menorah Jewish Community Center will open to the public on October 21st.

 
Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/france-honors-thousands-of-jews-placed-in-drancy-internment-camp-nearly-all-died-in-holocaust/2012/09/21/c0db57d8-03dd-11e2-9132-f2750cd65f97_story.html

Wearing arm bands marked with a Star of David, the crowd on Sunday marched to the mass grave of approximately 27,000 people executed by German soldiers near the city in 1942. Most of the victims were Jewish, according to the Russian Jewish Congress.

Leading the procession was Rabbi Meir Lau, a Holocaust survivor and former chief rabbi of Israel.

“The unprecedented turnout shows the memory of the Jewish genocide in Rostov is shared and preserved by Jews and non-Jews,” Russian Jewish Congress President Yury Kanner said.

Last year the memorial site became the subject of a legal fight between Kanner’s organization and local government. The Russian Jewish Congress petitioned the court about a memorial plaque that city officials had placed last November at the city’s Zmievskaya Balka mass grave that noted “mass killing by the fascists of captured Soviet citizens.” It replaced a plaque from 2004 that did mention the Holocaust.

A ruling on the matter is expected later this year, according to Matvey Chlenov, the RJC’s deputy executive director. Chlenov told JTA that city officials wrote a memo warning that mentioning the Holocaust could lead to “ethnic unrest.”

Southern Russia is home to many immigrants from the Caucasus region. Nationalist Russians staged riots there in 2010.

“We believe the new plaque is a parody more than any case of anti-Semitism or deliberate Holocaust obfuscation,” Chlenov said. “We nonetheless believe the original plaque at Zmievskaya Balka must be restored. It’s a matter of basic recognition of the identity of the victims.”

http://www.jta.org/news/article/2012/08/12/3103721/over-1000-people-commemorated-worst-holocaust-pogrom-in-russia

June, 1, 2012 Swastikas were painted on the Remember Memorial to genocide victims – civilians killed in the Nazi occupation of 1941-1943 – in Novomoskovsk, Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region, the regional police department told Interfax. ”Hooliganism” criminal case had been opened.