Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By richards on February 5, 2015

I'm crossposting this item that I put up today on Jewish Heritage Europe, the web site that I coordinate as a project of the Rothschild Foundation Europe. It looks back over the past quarter century of Jewish heritage preservation and priorities -- showing that despite progress that has been made and mind-sets that have changed, much still resonates:

Writing in September's Moment Magazine, Phyllis Myers posed the old question: should old synagogues in eastern Europe be saved?

Her answer and mine is, of course, a resounding YES.

It is important to remember, however, as Myers points out, that this answer was not self-evident or even all that widely held when she, and others involved in the field, first posed the question a quarter of a century ago, after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Myers first did so in a long article, also in Moment, published in 1990, called The Old Shuls of Eastern Europe: Are They Worth Saving?

Its worth reading again today to get a sense of the situation on the ground and in peoples mind-sets back then, just as the movement to document and restore Jewish built heritage in eastern and central Europe was getting under way. In a sense, her article represented a sort of blueprint for what could and should be the preservation priorities for the coming generation.

We preservebuildings and places, the simple and the awesomefor many reasons, Myers wrote in 1990.

See the original post:
Jewish Heritage Travel

Category: Jewish American Heritage Month
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