Summer brings a swathe of festivals to celebrate Yiddish culture lost and rediscovered. The European cities hosting these events are worth visiting at any time, for their architecture, culture and gastronomy – but the following offer special attractions this year.
Berlin
Berlin is marking the 25th anniversary of Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum with a show devoted to the architect, taking visitors from 1,000 years of German prosperity to the Holocaust and beyond. The museum’s permanent exhibition is also world-class. Summer Sundays offer free activities for families, with a children’s museum across the road, full of fantastic creations based on Noah’s Ark .
Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin[Missing Credit]
After exploring other highlights of Berlin – Museum Island, Checkpoint Charlie, the Tiergarten animal park and the elegant shopping thoroughfare of the Ku’Damm – hop on a train to discover Yiddish Summer Weimar in the gorgeous city of Goethe. This is where the Bauhaus school, which revolutionised 20th century architecture, was born – its successor, in Dessau, is celebrating its own centenary this year. There’s a special opportunity to experience the essence of the Bauhaus movement by staying in the school itself. Rooms once occupied by architecture students may share bathrooms and require guests to climb stairs, but they feature Marcel Breueur-designed chairs and other jewels of Bauhaus furniture as well as an abundance of the space and light considered revolutionary in 1926.
A new Bauhaus Museum – there is also one in Weimar – makes Dessau a cultural destination in its own right; it’s also a culinary one thanks to the Kornhaus restaurant, spilling out on to a large terrace beside the river Elbe, where Bauhaus professors and students once enjoyed waterside dinners.
Brno
Brno, second city of the Czech Republic, is a lively yet laid-back student town, accessible by direct flights. It’s the birthplace of Modernism in a country dominated for centuries by the Baroque, and many magnificent mansions were built for Jewish industrialists. Villa Tugendhat, residential masterpiece of former Bauhaus professor Mies van der Rohe, was commissioned by a family who enjoyed it for only a few years before they fled the Nazis.
Late August would be a great time to visit this Unesco world heritage site and other mansions with a Jewish history like Villa Stiassni and Villa Wittal, as this would coincide with Stetl Fest, five days of Jewish culture celebrating the revival of a community that came close to extermination in the Second World War.
Brno Synagogue with chandelier[Missing Credit]
The small Art Deco synagogue which survived, hidden from the Nazis behind a door with no signage, serves an active community which holds a Shabbat dinner for hundreds during Stetl Fest. This year, festival organisers will stage their own Shabbat feast on the site of the Great Synagogue destroyed in 1939, where excavations are under way and Stetl Fest events are being held for the first time.
Villa Tugendhat will be the site of musical events recalling the entertainments held in its revolutionary floating glass living room in the 30s, and there will be nightly free klezmer concerts in the courtyard of the Old Town Hall and musical performances from classical to techno, some featuring Israeli performers.
Krakow
Krakow, the ancient Polish capital which rivals Warsaw for its old-town beauty, has enjoyed an unimaginable revival of the Jewish life extinguished 80 years ago, when only a handful of mediaeval synagogues still stood to mark the fact their worshippers ever existed.
The revival is due to thousands of locals discovering they are members of the tribe; a flourishing Jewish Community Centre whose patron is King Charles, and the world’s most famous annual celebration of Jewish culture. Focused mostly on music, it features leading Israeli artists, performing cantors from all over the world and klezmer-jazz fusion from maestros such as the great American trumpeter, conductor and composer of spiritual music Frank London. London, this year appearing with his own celebrated band of 40 years, the Klezmatics, leads the post-Shabbat dance party which is a grand finale of the festival and alone worth the price of a ticket to Krakow.
You don’t need to attend at festival time (July 1-5 this year) to enjoy Krakow’s many other cultural attractions. They include the Galicia Jewish Museum and the Czartoryski Museum, whose exquisite collection includes a da Vinci. There is also an excellent museum of modern art across the river from Kazimierz, the lively ancient Jewish quarter where the festival takes place. At the boundary of the ghetto created by the Nazis, an installation of empty chairs stands as an outdoor memorial, with the former factory of Oskar Schindler close by, recreating the horrors of those times.
The ghetto memorial in Krakow[Missing Credit]
Opposite the factory, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków (Mocak) offers space, uplifting exhibits and spiritual respite. From July 3, it is exhibiting an installation based on the front covers of 100 books banned and/or burned by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945.
Day tours of Auschwitz are widely available. One can also book an excursion showcasing the skills of salt miners, who created a whole cathedral in which to pray for their safety at work, complete with altars and chandeliers. Offered as a combination tour with the camp, the Wieliczka mine visit can be a little too much, both physically and emotionally, to attempt in a single day but should not be missed as a separate excursion.
Venice
A shtetl synagogue floating above Venice’s mediaeval skyline will be a highlight of this year’s Biennale, on till September. It’s part of the presentation of the Yiddishland Pavilion – an arts initiative without borders or even bricks and mortar, showing art alongside the national pavilions which have faced controversy this year over the participation of Israel and Russia.
A floating synagogue at Venice's Piazza San MarcoShutterstock
Sculptor Belu-Simion Fainaru, officially representing Israel, is showing his work at the Arsenale, an easy stroll from San Marco. And expect to see other Jewish artists showcased in venues around the city, including America’s Judy Chicago and Israel’s Hagar Ophir Avi Mograbi. At Peggy Guggenheim’s palazzo on the Grand Canal, surely the most beautiful art museum in the world, the story of the late Jewish art collector’s London years will be told in an exhibition premiering at her Venice home before travelling to the Royal Academy.
Save a Saturday night for Canareggio, where half a millennium after Jews were expelled from the Venice Ghetto a new generation celebrates havdalah with circle dancing. There is at least one kosher restaurant nearby, but a real jewel of the neighbourhood is the non-kosher but delightful Anice Stellato on the banks of a quiet backwater.
Paris
Paris can be hot in high summer, but is perfect in September, when seasonal attractions augment those of the city’s museums. The Musée d’Orsay has a new gallery of Nazi-looted “orphaned” masterpieces, whose unknown owners were probably Jewish. And there is more art at the Musée d’Art et de l’Histoire du Judaisme in the historic Marais, a thriving centre of Jewish life in the city with the world’s third-largest community.
After visiting the museum, hit the Rue des Rosiers for a falafel or a cauliflower steak at Miznon, a bite from Goldenberg or one of the other Jewish bakeries and delis, and walk the colonnaded Place des Vosges where wealthy Jewish flâneurs once promenaded. A hidden jewel of the neighbourhood is the Agoudas Hakehilos Synagogue on Rue Pavée, with an exquisite art nouveau exterior by Hector Guimard, whose decorative Metro entrances make the Paris subway system a destination in its own right.
On the edge of the city, Musée Albert-Kahn celebrates the exquisite gardens of the Jewish banker in the suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt. For 30 years it was a home to European intelligentsia until Kahn went bankrupt in the 1929 crash and it became a public park, bringing together traditional French, English and Japanese planting styles.
Château de Champs-sur-Marne Centre des monuments nationaux[Missing Credit]
A little further out, the Château de Champs-sur-Marne is an 18th century treasure, home to King Louis XV’s mistress Madame Pompadour, then renovated by another Jewish banker, Louis Cahen d’Anvers and his wife Louise, who acquired it in 1895. A must for lovers of exquisite interiors and gardens and a reminder of the gilded, pre-Dreyfus age for the haute juiverie of the City of Light. t
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