Old Russia in color

The Boston Globe invites you to look back in time with this extraordinary collection of color photographs taken between 1909 and 1912 in Russia. In those years, photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) undertook a photographic survey of the Russian Empire with the support of Tsar Nicholas II. He used a specialized camera to capture three black and white images in fairly quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, allowing them to later be recombined and projected with filtered lanterns to show near true color images. The high quality of the images, combined with the bright colors, make it difficult for viewers to believe that they are looking 100 years back in time. Look at the photo collection here, made available by the Library of Congress, which purchased the original glass plates back in 1948. There are also some images connected to local Jewish heritage.

Source: The Boston Globe

Stop your cruel oppression of the Jews

Print shows an aged man labeled Russian Jew carrying a large bundle labeled Oppression on his back; hanging from the bundle are weights labeled Autocracy, Robbery, Cruelty, Assassination, Deception, and Murder.

In the background, on the right, a Jewish community burns, and in the upper left corner, Theodore Roosevelt speaks to the Emperor of Russia, Nicholas II, "Now that you have peace without, why not remove his burden and have peace within your borders?"

Ca. 1904. Source: Library of Congress

Gitenstein

In June 2009, US President Barack Obama announced his intent to nominate Mark Gitenstein as the U.S. ambassador to Romania.

I am really flattered to be asked by President Obama to take on this assignment, Gitenstein said. It’s not only an important national security assignment to undertake, as Romania is an important ally to the U.S., but also if I am confirmed, I will be in a sense returning to the home of my forefathers.

Gitenstein explained that his paternal grandfather, Israel Gitenstein or “Mr. G” as he was known to Florala residents, emigrated to the U.S. from today's Moldova Republic, which was at one time part of Romania, also known as Bessarabia. His grandmother’s parents were from Romania, making him the first U.S. Ambassador to Romania with Romanian heritage.

In September, 2009, he presented his credentials to Romanian President Traian Basescu.

Source: Andalusia Starnews and US Embassy in Bucharest

Komor & Dezsö

The most pleasant discovery of Târgu Mures is what I dare to call the Magyar version of the Palau de la Música Catalana (1908): it is the Palace of Culture (Palatul Culturii, Kultúrpalota), built between 1911 and 1913 - ordered by the mayor Bernády György (1864-1938), who has marked the history of the city with his entrepreneurship.

The fabulous palace was designed by two of the greatest Hungarian architects of that time: Marcell Komor (1868-1944) and Jakab Dezső (1864-1932), disciples of the so-called Hungarian Gaudí, the renowned architect Ödön Lechner (1845-1914), one of the first representatives of the Szecesszió, which, although clearly linked to Art Nouveau and Jugendstil in vogue throughout Europe, allowed the inclusion of local Hungarian folk elements.

 
Another interesting discovery was that both architects - who also conceived, at the behest of Bernády, the not least fantastic Town Hall of Targu Mures (1907), besides having signed several projects of homes, synagogues and public buildings built in Budapest, Vienna, Oradea, Timisoara, Bratislava, Szeged and Суботица - were born within Hungarian Jewish families. Marcell Komor, son of Rabbi Salamon Kohn (1828-1886), was a victim of the Holocaust.

Târgu Mures

Visiting in November 2010 the Transylvanian city of Târgu Mures (Marosvásárhely, Neumarkt), I could not help admiring its ancient center, which still shows beautiful Art Nouveau elements - in vogue among Hungarian architects of the early 20th century - promoted in the years prior to World War I by its visionary mayor György Bernády.

Part of the important urban transformations that the city suffered, and which were to delete its rural features, is the Great Synagogue, considered by many the most beautiful Jewish temple in Transylvania. Opened in 1900, it was built according to the plans in eclectic style by the Viennese architect Jakob Gärtner (1861-1921). 

In 1944, under the dictatorial regime that ruled Hungary from 1940 until that year in Northern Transylvania, about 7000 Jews from the city - 15% of the population - were concentrated in ghettos and then deported to death in Auschwitz. In all, 150,000 Jews were deported from all over Northern Transylvania. Today, in the current province of Mures, Jews are not more than 200.

In 2003, Romanian local authorities inaugurated, in a central square, a memorial to those victims. The statue, representing an embraced family, was performed by one of the survivors of the tragedy: Martin Izsak.

Mein shtetele Belz

The city of Bălţi (Bielce, Бельцы, Бэлць, Бєльці, בעלץ) appears in documents of the 15th century as an important center of horse trade, it's no wonder that its first crest showed a horse's head. Gradually, the city also became a center for craftsmen - blacksmiths, saddlers, chariot-makers, furriers. The Russian Empire, which in 1812 incorporated the eastern part of Moldavia, which then was known as Bessarabia, increased the administrative autonomy of the town that, once connected to the rail network, became a collect center of grain that was transported to Odessa .

Due to the economic development, many Russians, Ukrainians and Jews joined the local population. The number of immigrants continued to grow, especially after the union of Bessarabia with Romania in 1918, because of the influx of refugees across the river Dniester fleeing the Soviet collectivization, the famine known as Holodomor (1932-33) or the secret police of the Soviet communist party (NKVD).

During the 2nd World War the city was severely destroyed and suffered major deportations. First (1940-41), the Soviets deported to Kazakhstan and Siberia priests and Moldavian civil servants working for the Romanian State and then (1941-44), Romanians and Germans deported Jews - who constituted at least half the local population and that were confined to a ghetto - and citizens suspected of supporting the Soviet system. Soviet deportations were resumed between 1945 and 1954.

During the communist regime, the city became the most important industrial center of northern Moldavia, with an almost entirely transplanted population, comprising Russian, Ukrainian and Moldavian peasants.

Bălţi, who was once wistfully evoked in the famous Yiddish song Mein shtetele Belz, in 1928, is today the "northern capital" of the Republic of Moldova, the second most important city in the country and boasting a population of nearly 150 000 people , of which about 400 make up the local Jewish community, currently led by Mr. Lev Bonder.

Photo: Jaime Serebrenic (São Paulo) in front of the only remaining synagogue in Bălţi, May 2010.

Warsaw ghetto

My wanderings in the Polish capital at the beginning of July 2010 ended up taking me to the former ghetto area. In a large square near Zamenhof street, surrounded by communist blocks erected on the rubble piles of the old Jewish houses, we can see the colossal monument dedicated to the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto, designed by the sculptor Nathan Rappaport and inaugurated in the 1980s by the communist authorities.

 
In the spring of 1943, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising was brutally suppressed by the Nazi army, who slaughtered more than 13,000 Jews during the successful operation of annihilation of that part of the town. Most of the 50,000 remaining Jews were captured and shipped to the unimaginable extermination camp of Treblinka.

Some say that, ironically, the material used by the sculptor has previously been commissioned by the Nazis in order to build a monument to the expected German victory.

 
A few meters from the tragic memorial, behind fences, we can see the ongoing construction of the ambitious Museum of the History of Polish Jews, due to open its doors in 2012.

 
In the square that houses Rappaport's colossus, dotted by small black marble monuments around adjacent streets and celebrating, in Polish and Hebrew, different personalities, places and moments of this macabre story, older people sat quietly on benches under the weekend sunshine, while residents of the neighborhood  walked their dogs over the buried rubble, amidst ghosts whose piercing screams guided my steps.