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The visitor to Eastern Europe hoping to discover a rich Jewish architectural heritage must remember that what was once the center of Judaic cultural and religious life in Europe -principally in Lithuania between the eighteenth century and the Shoah- had disappeared beyond ruins and cemeteries. The complete eradication of a Jewish presence, the sworn objective of the Nazis, was conducted with ...
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Serbia and Voivodina form, along with Montenegro, a nation that had been called The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia until 4 February 2003, when it was renamed Serbia and Montenegro. The Serbian and Voivodinan regions witnessed one of the first implementations of the Final Solution, its Jewish population as brutally martyred by German troops as were Jews in Poland or the Soviet Union. In fact, ...
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In a medieval miniature, Bulgarian Czarina Sara figures beside her husband, Czar Alexander, a two children, Shishman and Tamara. A Jewish queen, Sara of Turvono was obliged to convert to Christianity, adopting the name Theodora. In the fourteenth century such a union shock no one in Constantinople, though it would have been inconceivable to the leaders of Rome.
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There is little evidence of a Jewish presence on the coats of the Black Sea before the arrival of Roman legions in the early second century C.E. Vestiges, coins, and inscriptions preserved in a museum in Bucharest, however, attest to the existence of Jews in the region throughout the first millennium. Near the end of the thirteenth century, the great voyager Benjamin de Tudela had already ...
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Below the bell tower of Prague's Jewish city hall, there are two clock faces. One displays Roman numerals, and the other Hebrew letters. The hands of the first clock revolve in the normal clockwise direction while those of the second turn counterclockwise, following the customary manner of reading Hebrew right to left. Such clocks are rare, and this is the only one of its kind adorning a ...
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The history of Jews in Slovakia -dating from the sixteenth century under the protection of the Hapsburg- intersects that of their fellow believers in Hungary and the Czech Republic. Jews in these three countries experienced the same vicissitudes of discrimination, expulsions, and, in the seventeenth century, the acquisition of some civil rights. Numerous Jews from neighboring Moravia flocked ...
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At the Jewish Museum of Budapest, a replica of a tombstone dating from the third century bears the image of a menorah. This relic attests to nearly 1700 years of Jewish presence in the Carpathian basin, predating that of the Magyar tribes who broke free from the confines of the Ural Mountains during the ninth century. The modern history of Judaism in Hungary goes all the way back to ...
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Jewish settlers had to wait until the death of Austria's Catholic and very anti-Semitic Archduchess Maria Theresa and the ascension of her her tolerant son, Joseph II, to gain the right to establish communities in northern Croatia, which at the time had been Hapsburg territory for nearly three centuries.
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A Slavic land under Germanic rule for many centuries, Slovenia finally gained independence in 1991. The fate of the Jewish population here depended largely over the years on the good will of its princes. Nonetheless, the Jewish presence in the region goes back to antiquity. Archaeological digs have revealed a tomb engraved with a menorah at the Skocjan site, which likely dates back to the ...
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Austria present borders cover only a small part of the former Empire, once a major continental power of Central Europe and heir to the Holy Roman Empire. The empire was formed through an alliance with the kingdom of Hungary, becoming the imperial and royal "double monarchy" (kaiserlich und königlich, or "k. und k.").
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Jewish craftsmen and merchants settled in Switzerland's Roman cities between the third and fourth centuries, but the first documents that mention them date only from the thirteenth century. Throughout the following two centuries, Jews were regularly accused of ritualistic crimes on Christian children and poisoning wells.
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At the end of the nineteenth century, an international conference took place sponsored by the Zionist Organisation that was dedicated to the problem of the future national language of the Jewish state. A heated debate was held and the question put to vote: Hebrew won out only by several votes over German to become the national language. As absurd as it might seem, the language of Goethe ...
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Brussels, the capital of the European institutions, a celebratory place appreciated by tourists, but also a city immortalised by the numerous comic strips born there, remains an amazing city. The cohabitation of a magnificent old town, office towers, and numerous bars where one finds the warm Belgian spirit. But also a worrying radicalism and its drifts, as illustrated by the terrorist attack ...
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The history of the Belgian Jews is similar to that of the Jews of western Europe generally, involving migrations and internal changes as the old communities came under the influence of other traditions.
The Jews came to what is now Belgium in the thirteenth century, settling at Arlon (Aarlen), Brussels, Hasselt, Jodoigne (Geldenaken), Zootleeuw (Leau), Leuven (Louvain), Mechelen (Malines), ...
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Despite the devastations of the Second World War and the aesthetic shortcomings of post-war reconstruction, Amsterdam offers the visitor a Jewish patrimony of extraordinary richness that is concentrated, for the most part, in its memorials. The former Jewish quarter, the Jodenbuurt, is yours to discover along the streets and canals in the southeast of the city. It is easy to imagine the ...
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Holland has always welcomed political and religious refugees. The first great wave of Jews immigrated to the Netherlands from Spain and Portugal at the end of the sixteenth century. Although nominally present since the twelfth century, the Jews in Holland were able to openly practise their religion for the first time beginning in this later period. The Sephardic Jews were the first to make a ...
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As in the rest of the country, the Scottish capital received virtually no Jews until the 18th century. We find the administrative trace of a request for installation by a certain David Brown in 1691. The first request for the purchase of a tomb by a Jew was that of Herman Lyon, a dentist from Germany who settled in in the city in 1788. About 20 families founded a Jewish community in Edinburgh ...
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The first mention of a Jew in Scotland is in the minutes of a meeting by the Edinburgh Council date 1 September 1665, and it relates to his request to be converted so that he can work in the city. Jewish communities in Scotland date from 1717 in Edinburgh and 1823 in Glasgow.
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It’s a strange feeling when you arrive in Drancy. The former internment camp and the Shoah Memorial opposite it are located near the junction of the avenues Jean Jaurès and Henri Barbusse. The town of Drancy, in the Seine-Saint-Denis department, is home to a large number of shops, cafés and markets. Would it be a challenge to push open this door, to enter this memorial and discover the ...
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110 Avenue Jean Jaurès – Esplanade Charles de Gaulle, 93700 Drancy Tel : +33 1 42 77 44 72 Accueil
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“Here is buried the body of Sieur Salomon de Perpignan, one of the founders of the Free Royal Drawing School established in the year 1767 of the glorious reign of Louis XV in the city of Paris…Died 22 February 1781”. These are the words on one of the oldest tomb in Paris’s Jewish cemetery. They give an idea of the social importance acquired by the ...
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In addition to its architecture and activities, the (or Palais Garnier) is notable for its extraordinary ceiling painted by Marc Chagall in 1964. Not far from here, in a room at Hôtel de Castille (37 rue Cambon), Theodor Herzl wrote The Jewish State. This was the founding work of political Zionism, which bore fruit some fifty years later in the proclamation of the State of Israel. is ...
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At the beginning of the twentieth century, the legendary bohemia of Montparnasse included many Russians Jewish painters who had fled the anti-Semitic pogroms of the day. Among them were Soutine, Chagall, and Zadkine. Others, such as Modigliani, were simply attracted by the city’s prestige and contributed to the tremendous creative effervescence of the day. These inspired individuals, ...
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In the eighteenth century, the area around the Place Saint Paul was known as “the old Jewry”. Until the first years of the twentieth century, the square itself bore the name Place des Juifs. The narrow streets here are best explored on a Sunday morning, when everyday Jewish life has resumed after the Shabbat. Rue Pavée is a few yards from the Saint Paul métro station. This is the ...
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The sculptures on the Saint Anne portal of offer one of the most moving testimonies we have to medieval Judaism. The frieze in question, just above the doorway, dates from the late twelfth century. It represents the Virgin’s mother, Saint Anne, meeting her future husband, Saint Joachim. The unknown artist used Parisian Jews as his models in order to represent these early ...
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In 1182, King Philippe Auguste decided to expel the Jews from the capital. Synagogues were converted into churches and building owned by Jews were sold, with the proceeds going to the Crown. The sovereign used the sums thus amassed to build the keep of the castle at Vincennes and to put a wall around the nearby woods. Within Paris itself he built a market in the now deserted Champeaux quarter ...
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The history of Jewish communities in France is characterised by a remarkable diversity, both historically and regionally. It would be futile to look for a coherent identity or shared experiences that would link the communities that were "taxed to the hilt" by the monarchy in the heartlands of the kingdom (Paris, Rouen) to the "rich hours" of the Sephardim in the Comtat Venaissin (Carpentras, ...
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