A mile in their shoes
16.05.2008, [08:04] // Digest //
By Moshe Gilad
Tags: Jewish History, Ukraine
The city of Zhytomyr in western Ukraine does not appear on tourist maps. It lies 100 kilometers west of Kiev and today has some 300,000 residents. It is a commercially important city, situated along the main road connecting Warsaw and Kiev, but tourists don't have any real reason to visit there.
Nevertheless, several hundred Israeli tourists visit annually. They come to Zhytomyr to see the home where Haim Nahman Bialik lived. A strict grandfather took in Bialik after he was orphaned at the age of seven. The boy did not have an easy time in his grandfather's house and described those rather difficult days in his writings.
"There's something chilling about this visit," says former MK Eti Livni. "Visiting places where Hebrew culture developed fills in more of the picture of Hebrew culture, the part that's missing for us. Such a visit transforms our cultural roots into something tangible. From a remote and not completely understood place, Bialik's home, like many other sites that are visited in Ukraine, turns into something that we have a direct and tangible connection to."
The first reason for Livni's visit to Ukraine was a trip to the village of Baer near Odessa, where her father came from. She describes the visit to Baer as a difficult experience. "It's an exhausted town and not a pleasant place. The local residents don't seem like nice people to live with. There are no Jews there today and in effect, we didn't find any real roots there." Following the footsteps of Jewish life in Ukraine provided Livni with invaluable experiences.
Paris: Just another place
Livni's trip is an example of a growing trend among Israelis. Many are now combining "roots trips" with a study of Jewish culture overseas. Yoel Rappel, a historian and researcher of Judaism, who organizes and guides such trips, explains their importance: "A personal trip often ends quickly and with disappointment. In towns where the parents and grandparents of many of the participants came from, there is today no remnant of a Jewish past. Often it is merely props and it is difficult to see or grasp that our cultural roots are here. The combination of a personal tour of sites from which the Jewish culture emerged completes the picture."
The list of sites on such tours is surprisingly long. Journalist Haggai Hitron, who participated in such a trip in the past and wrote an article about it afterward for Haaretz ("2,000 kilometers in Ukraine") said: "The route we took reflected an attempt to see a little that covered a lot of ground. From grand Kyiv to wonderful Odessa, and from there to towns in the Podillia region and then to Chernivtsi, the European-looking center, in Bukovyna; and from there to eastern Galicia (including Lviv), and elsewhere and then back to Kyiv; 2,000 kilometers, four large cities, 25 towns. An amount that completely mixes you up, were it not for the ease of digitally documenting everything."
A look at the sites included in the Jewish cultural tours shows how rich the variety is: In Kyiv, it is possible to trace the paths of Sholem Aleichem and Golda Meir; in Zhytomyr and Khrostichev, one can follow the steps of Bialik; in Berdychiv one can trace the life of Mendele Mokher Seforim; in Rovno one can follow the course of Amos Oz and his book, "A Tale of Love and Darkness"; in Buchach, the path of S.Y. Agnon and his books, "Oreah Noteh Lalun" (A Guest for the Night) and "Ir Umeloah" (A City and the Fullness Thereof).
Visitors to Buchach walk along the banks of the Stripa River and reach the gymnasium described by Agnon. Hitron described his visit to Buchach as follows: "Even beautiful Paris becomes just another place when you see it from a tower, but in Buchach, it's the opposite: in order to see the place well, it must be seen from the hill above it (a short climb, of about 10 minutes). A close look shows that the town is in need of refurbishing, given the shattered sidewalks, which impede on the impression of the Stripa River and the famous City Hall building (in Agnon, it is referred to as "the big council hall in our town, which all of Poland's towns were envious of us, because of it"). In Lviv, one absorbs the atmosphere that provided inspiration for Uri Zvi Greenberg, Brenner and Alona Frankel. In Odessa, on the banks of the Black Sea, tourists visit the spot where Ahad Ha'am, Bialik, Pinsker and many others were active.
Rappel points out that in many places the only tourists coming are Jews and Israelis. Bialik's house in Zhitomir, for example, is located in a particularly remote area. "The residents want the government and the municipality to turn it into a Bialik museum, and thereby increase the value of the property," explains Rappel.
Odessa is another kind of example. Many tourists visit this city, which is an important port city, regardless of the Jewish culture connection, and yet, Rappel says, in recent years a critical mass of Jewish sites has emerged there. Today there are 22 houses scattered around the city with signs in Hebrew and Yiddish, providing visitors with information about the house's past as a historical site. The city's synagogue was recently renovated and signs were affixed describing its historical importance. The nearby KGB building, also of historical importance, did not warrant such treatment.
1 Zamenhoff Street, Kovno
In the Latvian capital of Riga, in Vilnius, Lithuania and in other places as well, there have recently been efforts to develop Jewish sites. In Kovno, streets were recently named after figures from its Zionist past, such as Mapu and Zamenhoff. There it is possible to trace the pasts of the poet Leah Goldberg and the writer Abba Kovner.
Another interesting example is the town of Drohobych, around 100 kilometers from Lviv, Ukraine. Today it has no Jewish community, but on the eve of World War II, around 15,000 Jews lived there, nearly half the population of this small place. Two of the town's famous native sons today make it an important place. The painter Maurycy Gottlieb was born in Drohobych, whose well-known painting, "Day of Atonement" (1878) is on display at the Tel Aviv Museum. Another person who was born and lived here is the artist Bruno Schulz. Schulz, who was the drawing teacher at the local school, was shot to death in Drohobych during the war by a Gestapo officer. Many years later, he gained a reputation as one of Europe's greatest writers of the early 19th century and there were some who even compared him to Kafka. David Grossman dedicated a chapter to him in his book, "See Under Love" (Schulz's book, "Cinnamon Shops" was published in Hebrew by Schocken Books).
In 2001, a mural drawn by Schulz during the war under the orders of an SS officer was discovered in his home in Drohobych. The mural was transferred in a controversial move to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Remembrance Authority and only in late February was an agreement announced formalizing its status as belonging to Ukraine but remaining on long-term loan to Yad Vashem.
Recently the Jewish Agency organized a trip to Drohobych in which 450 Jewish students from the former Commonwealth of Independent States took part, in the footsteps of the life and death of Schulz. In the students' schools, the Jewish Agency runs a program that features a "roots trip" to lost communities in the Pale of Settlement, the area where Jews were permitted to settle during the rule of the Russian czars.
Is such a trip more important for students from Russia than for students from Israel? Livni stresses the importance of the guidance and knowledge that comes with such a trip tracing the past. Without it, it is very hard to connect to these places and understand them.
The sites themselves are not enough. The background, the literary descriptions and the imagination are what turn such a trip into a meaningful experience. Livni approached Education Minister Yuli Tamir and suggested changing at least some of the trips that high-school students take to the death camps to Poland into trips in the footsteps of the history of Zionism and the development of Hebrew culture. She says, "It's not easy to find such moving examples today of the journeys Jewish youths undertook 100 years ago, when they created ... a meaningful ideology that they strove to realize."
