Ruth Ellen Gruber
By Ruth Ellen Gruber
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Culture Uniting Jewish Heritage Sites Across Czech Republic
No Jews have lived in this nondescript little town 80 miles southeast of Prague since the Holocaust, but driving in, you can’t miss the synagogue. Rose-pink and ochre, with fanciful arched windows and a central peaked roof flanked by two squat towers, it rises dramatically over the rooftops, dominating the otherwise drab surroundings. Inside, chandeliers…
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Breaking News Poland Remembers Shoah in New Ways
(JTA) — Two very different events, hundreds of miles apart, demonstrated the wide range of ways in which the memory of Jews and the Holocaust are commemorated in Poland. One was a simple grass-roots ceremony to dedicate a monument at the site of the destroyed Jewish cemetery in a small town called Rychwal, in central Poland….
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News Jewish Wedding Symbolizes Revival in Poland City of Wroclaw
(JTA) — When Katka Reszke and Slawomir Grunberg tied the knot at the historic White Stork synagogue in this southwestern Polish city, they were determined that the occasion would be more than just a wedding. They wanted it to be a symbol of how thousands of Polish Jews — like themselves — have found their…
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News Hungary Jews Unify Around Fight With Government Over Holocaust Whitewash
(JTA) — It isn’t every day that Jewish organizations reject funding for Holocaust commemorations. But that’s what happened in Hungary this spring when Jewish groups refused nearly $1 million in special state grants to protest what they see as the government’s whitewashing of Hungarian complicity in the Holocaust. “We wanted to send a very strong message…
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Culture Hungary Designer Has a Little Dreidel (and a Menorah)
Andras Daranyi reached across the table in one of the trendy cafes in Budapest’s old downtown Jewish district and fondly patted an unusual-looking object about the size of a bowling ball. Made of dark-gray concrete, the object had eight sides, each an equilateral triangle. Each triangle was perforated by an arrangement of between two and…
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The Schmooze Actor Quits Milan Jewish Community Over Israel
(JTA) — Since the 1980s the Italian Jewish actor Moni Ovadia has garnered a popular following with stage productions and cabaret acts largely based on Yiddish, klezmer music and Jewish jokes and legends. Born in Bulgaria, Ovadia, 67, came to Milan as a small child and attended the Jewish school there. Arguably Italy’s best known…
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Culture Putting Florence’s Jewish History Into the Spotlight
If you look out over Florence from Piazzale Michelangelo, high above the Arno, two domes catch your eye. One is Filipo Brunelleschi’s masterpiece, the immense ribbed dome of the Duomo. The other, off to the right, is much smaller but in its way also distinctive: It is the tall, bright green copper dome of the…
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Opinion When Lou Reed Partied at My Place
(JTA) — Lou Reed’s death on Sunday has made me think not just of his music but of his life, and specifically about when his life and mine briefly intersected, back when my brother Frank and I entertained him at our parents’ Philadelphia home, unbeknownst to mom and dad. It was 1969 and Frank, then…
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