In Mad, a village in the far northeast corner of Hungary, a splendid Baroque synagogue built in 1795 stands locked and empty on a hill above a welter of muddy lanes and red roofed houses.
In Piatra Neamt, in northern Romania, immense Jewish tombstones dating back centuries and carved with vivid images of candelabra, broken branches and praying hands are silhouetted against a steep forested slope above the town.
In Bardejov, Czechoslovakia, workers stack plumbing fixtures under the towering vaulted ceiling of a devastated synagogue: The lofty arches are still decorated with brilliant red and blue frescoes, but the building is used now as a warehouse.
In Dzialoszyce, Poland, an old woman who lives across the dusty square from the ruined, roofless shell of a neoclassical synagogue tells me that before World War II she worked for the local rabbi.
”I will never forget what he told me,” she says. ”He said that when the birds go away from here, the Jews will go away too. One year there was a hard winter; there were no birds. And after that . . .”
Before the Nazi Holocaust, nearly 5 million Jews lived in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. Today, half a century later, fewer than 150,000 Jews live in these countries, and nearly 100,000 of these are concentrated in the Hungarian capital, Budapest.
Millions of people were slaughtered during the Holocaust. Thousands upon thousands of Jewish communities were erased. Synagogues, homes and Jewish quarters were torched; gravestones were torn up to pave roads and build pigsties. Tens of thousands of books and religious objects were destroyed.
The Jewish civilization that had existed for 1,000 years in the region-and from which most American Jews have descended-was wiped out in the space of a few years, almost as completely as other civilizations, such as the Incas or the ancient Romans, died out centuries in the past.
Throughout the region, though, stand eloquent, all but forgotten reminders of the rich, thousand-year Jewish presence: thousands of Jewish cemeteries, many abandoned and untended for decades; hundreds of former synagogues, languishing in disrepair or converted for secular use ranging from sports halls to museums; former Jewish neighborhoods where one can still see the scars of the mezuzas that were removed from doorposts.
Over the past two years, I have made it my business to seek out these places, to describe and photograph them; ultimately to compile them, and some of my experiences in discovering them, into a book, ”Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Central and Eastern Europe” ($14.95, John Wiley & Sons) released this month.
In preparing the book, I often felt like an archeologist, digging and delving into the ruins. I tried to detach myself from my investigations, to inquire and photograph and write descriptions and ignore the ghosts. Much of the time I was successful, but occasionally I found myself stopping for breath, or choked by a lump in my throat I could not swallow.
I was moved to carry out the research and write the book by several compelling factors, all of which intensified as I traveled thousands of miles tracing the ruins of a once-vibrant culture.
Fascination with what I was discovering-a wealth of historically and artistically important monuments-was one motivation.
Anger was another-anger not just at the Holocaust and the destruction of Jewish civilization in Eastern Europe, but anger that the ruins of this civilization were so forgotten. I became determined to put as many of them as I could on the map.
In the course of my career as a journalist, I lived and worked in Central and Eastern Europe for more than six years, yet aside from major sites of the Holocaust itself, such as the death camps of Auschwitz and Treblinka, or isolated Jewish complexes or museums such as in Prague, Budapest or Krakow, I found little mention of the Jewish historical sites or even the Jewish presence in guidebooks or other material geared for travelers.
Centuries-old churches and castles were pointed out aplenty. Why not centuries-old synagogues?
Then, too, I felt the necessity of broadening the awareness of Jewish history. When people today think of Jews and Eastern and Central Europe, they think primarily in terms of their destruction. If they go to the region, they visit Auschwitz and pay tribute to the millions who were murdered during the short years of the Holocaust.
book deals with six countries: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania and Bulgaria. For each, I offer a survey of Jewish history in the country and a main section in which I give a fairly detailed description of up to several dozen Jewish heritage sites.
In addition to those sites, I give brief descriptions of many more. I also have provided tips: what visitors should bring with them, for example;
what to expect in the way of accommodation; what to wear; how to find the sites.
I also suggest how to deal with the intense emotions seeing the ruins might trigger and what evidence there might be of the resurgemuch anti-Semitic graffiti and vandalism but experienced anti-Semitism only once, when my travel companions and I were hassled by a group of drunks in a Polish village.
Most people I encountered-be they Holocaust survivors keeping the faith in isolated enclaves, or non-Jewish residents of once largely Jewish towns-were wonderfully warm, welcoming and willing to go out of their way to help.
