In Toledo, asleep in the room of the moneylenders

We took advantage of our empty nest status to take a week-long trip to Spain this month, the first time in almost 20 years that we could travel at a time when schools weren’t on vacation. In Toledo, we have been staying in a delightful small hotel called La Posada de Manolo that, for me, is as evocative and fascinating as any of the official sights in this historic medieval city.

The Sanchez Nunez family turned their 500-year-old home into a hotel that celebrates Toledo’s three religious heritages — Moorish (Muslim), Jewish and Christian. In a detailed and  incredibly thoughtful renovation in 2001, each of the three floors was decorated to honor one of those traditions.

Rooms were named after various medieval professions. Purely by happenstance, we ended up on the Jewish floor in a room that, instead of a number, is called Los Prestamistas — the Moneylenders. (Before your anti-Semitism antennae start vibrating furiously, let me add that that the other rooms on the Jewish floor are the Farmers, Doctors and Translators.)

Sam after a tough day of touring, in the Moneylenders room / Photo by Ilana DeBare

La Posada de Manolo is outfitted in my favorite style of European hotel — revealing and emphasizing the historic, artisanal “bones” of the building while providing modern comforts like wifi and a good mattress. The hallways show the heavy wooden ceiling beams; the rooms have thick, ornate wooden doors that close with iron latches. The head board and night tables in our room are heavy, rustic wood.

And the decor is geared to the room’s vocational theme — a wooden case on one wall holds brass scales that might have been used by money lenders, while another wall displays two medieval drawings of financial transactions. The Farmers room down the hall had a big rustic pitchfork mounted on its wall. A Moorish room named after Silversmiths had, of course, some silver cups and bowls on the wall.

It’s like sleeping in a museum!

Scales on the wall of our room / Photo by Ilana DeBare

Like the owners of La Posada de Manolo, the city of Toledo has made a concerted effort to recognize and celebrate its three heritages. Jews lived here for about 1,000 years until they were expelled in 1492; Muslims lived here for hundreds of years until they too were forced out with the Inquisition.

The government has renovated two synagogues, turning the stunning Sinagoga del Transito (built in the 1300s by Jews, with permission from the Christian rulers, and using Moorish craftsmen and design motifs) into a museum of Jewish life in Spain. The onetime Juderia or Jewish Quarter has tiny tiles embedded in the stone streets that say in Hebrew “Sepharad” (Spanish Jewry) and “Chai” (lives). Our timing wasn’t right to catch it, but the city sponsored seven encuentros with Jewish culture in 2012 — mini-festivals of food, music and film timed to holidays such as Sukkot and Chanukah.

Sinagoga de Transito, with Moorish-influenced windows and carved walls, facing east where the Ark of the Torah would have been / Photo by Ilana DeBare

Biblical text bordering the synagogue just below the roof / Photo by Ilana DeBare

Street with “chai” tile in the Jewish quarter of Toledo / Photo by Ilana DeBare

Every time Sam and I go to Europe, we seek out pieces of local Jewish history — the ghetto in Venice, the former Jewish quarter in Amsterdam, the old cemetery and synagogues in Prague. Honestly, it’s more interesting to me than cathedrals. (Although we visit those too of course.) There’s a personal connection, even if my ancestors lived nowhere near these cities. I think, “Huh, this is how I might have lived if I had been here in 1400.”

So it’s both gratifying and impressive to me how much Europe has, in the past fifty years, moved to celebrate its Jewish heritage. They slaughtered us, tortured us, burned us, forcibly converted us, expelled us, and as recently as the 1940s tried to industrially eradicate us from the planet. Many cities no longer have actual Jewish communities. Yet  in the space of one generation, Europeans have turned around, acknowledged their wrongs and put out a welcome mat to Jewish culture. (Sepherad chai!)

Of course one can quibble cynically with this. It’s easy to ask: Are North African immigrants or Roma minorities the modern substitute for Jews in European bigotry? Is anti-Zionist rhetoric the 21st century version of anti-Semitism? But consider countries like Iran and Iraq that expelled or persecuted Jews more recently than Europe. Wouldn’t it be great to have them acknowledge the historic contributions of their Jewish populations the way that Western Europe has? Wouldn’t it be great to see Sepharad Chai (or the Persian translation of that) in the sidewalks of Teheran?

So this is all really good. I love the renovated synagogues, the restored Jewish cemeteries, our little Jewish floor at La Posada de Manolo.

But it’s also unsettling. Visiting Europe, you’re confronted not just with 1,500 years worth of great art and architecture, but with 1,500 years of nearly-constant war. Spain fighting England, England fighting France, France fighting Spain, etc. The post-World War II Europe of cooperation, economic integration, social democracy and human rights is a brilliant development but a very recent, very young development.

View from our hotel window of the Toledo cathedral, built between 1226 and 1495 / Photo by Ilana DeBare

Meanwhile, we Jews have lived in the United States in significant numbers for only about 130 years — and we feel completely secure. Assimilated. Americanized. We worry about Israel, but about ourselves? Not really. We are U.S. senators, university professors, hedge fund managers, newspaper pundits, community organizers, Hollywood producers. We are the model of a successful minority.

And so were the Jews of Spain! They lived here for a thousand years! Samuel Levi, who built the Sinagoga del Transito and for whom a street is named in the Jewish Quarter, was treasurer to the king of Spain!

And then…. expulsion and Inquisition.

Photo by Ilana DeBare

I found myself thinking, as we meandered our merry touristic way with cameras and guidebooks in hand, of some lines in Gates of Repentance, the Reform prayerbook for Yom Kippur. This section of the afternoon service recounts the history of persecution of the Jews and concludes:

Look and remember. Look upon this land,

Far, far across the factories and the grass.

Surely there, surely, they will let you pass.

Speak then and ask the forest and the loam.

What do you hear? What does the land command?

The earth is taken; this is not your home.

 

Czech Jewry – destruction and a (sort of) revival

I’ve been reluctant to blog from vacation. First, I don’t have a computer so I need to rent the hotel’s (and as I type this, am coping with its Czech kezboard — see, that “z” was where the “y” should be! Apologies in advance for future z-y confusion). And, most of what we have been doing has been pretty much Typical Tourist. So, while I am as happy as anyone to bore my friends with photos of Ilana-in-front-of-the-Van-Gogh-Museum or Sam-by-the-astronomical-clock, I am reluctant to impose the verbal equivalent of that on you, dear blog readers.

But yesterday… two very different yet connected experiences that feel worth sharing.

Our third and last day in Prague, we took a public bus about an hour north of the city to Terezin, the site used by the Nazis as a transit camp en route to death camps such as Auschwitz. About 140,000 Jews arrived in Terezin over a four-year period — a quarter died of hunger, illness etc. in the camp — then 87,000 were transported east to death camps, and of those, only 4,000 survived.

Terezin was not what we think of as a typical death camp. It was more of a hybrid ghetto-camp. The site was a Bohemian fortress built in the late 1700s, which had a village inside it. The villagers were forced out by the Nazis, who used it as a gathering place for Jews deported not just from Czechoslavakia but from Austria, Germany and as far afield as the Netherlands. (Reform Rabbi Leo Baeck of Berlin was among those imprisoned there.) While in Terezin, Jews lived in cramped dormitories — we saw one re-created room with about 57 beds in triple-decker bunks, in a space about three times the size of our living room. But they also maintained a living society, with artists, writers, classes for the children, music lessons. (You may have seen books or exhibits of children’s art from Terezin, and the children’s opera Brundibar was written there.)

Terezin was host to one particularlz cynical moment in Holocaus history when the Nazis invited the International Red Cross to visit and see that Jews were not being persecuted by the Reich. They cleaned up the camp, built sports fields and gardens, and forced inmates to play the part of happy villagers: The Terezin museum shows a documentarz with footage from a propaganda film made by the Nazis with images of happy Jews cheering a soccer match, shopping and chatting, watering beautiful gardens.

The Red Cross bought it hook, line and sinker.

That deception is what struck me most at the camp, and I felt momentarily angrier at the Red Cross officials who gave the Nazis a clean bill of health than at the Nazis themselves. How hard would it have been to insist on seeing a dormitory that was not on the official tour? How hard would it have been to demand to speak with inmates outside the presence of a securitz guard? I thought of all the political and humanitarian fact-finding missions that go on today — from delegations to the Gaza strip, to UN inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities — and wished they all could be shown the Terezin movie before beginning their work.

The other thing that struck me was that Terezin today is an inhabited town. Yes, there is a very good museum in some of the buildings, and memorials, and a Jewish cemetery, but there are dozens of buildings that now seem to house average Czechs. Overall it was quiet when we were there — kind of a ghost town feeling in the middle of a hot, still day — but we could still see satellite dishes on buildings, a kid riding a bike here and there, a dog sleeping on a stoop, a little market selling meat and cheese and canned goods.

A Terezin street today

How could you live in a town like that? I’m sure the residents have reasons — maybe their families lived there in its pre=camp days, or maybe under Communism they had to take whatever housing was assigned — but still. How would you go about daily life knowing that your bedroom was a dormitory for people on the path to death? That your kitchen housed people dying of dysentery, tuberculosis, starvation? That the sidewalk in front of your house was where people were lined up to be shipped to death camps? That it was all enclosed with barbed wire?

That was the afternoon. In the evening, we went to services at the Spanish synagogue in Prague’s Jewish quarter. Neither Spanish nor Sephardic, the Spanish synagogue is an elaborately-Moorish-style building erected in the late 1800s by Prague¨s then-prosperous Reform congregation to replace a centuries-old Gothic synagogue. Festooned with painted arches and geometrical shapes on a background of deep burgundy, it must have been the pride of the community when it was built. Then, in the Nazi occupation, it became a warehouse for Jewish ritual items looted from homes and synagogues throughout the Reich, gathered together with the idea of creating a “Museum of an Extinct Race.” Under the Soviets, it sat neglected and deteriorating. Then, over the past 20 years, it was restored as part of the Jewish museum in Prague.

Inside the elaborately painted "Spanish" synagogue of Prague

The synagogue today is used by a small local community of Conservative Jews, which apparently includes a fair number of Jews from abroad residing in Prague. When we attended it was a motley crew — a good sized crowd of about 50, but nearly all tourists. As far as I could tell, there were fewer than five “locals” attending — an impressively articulate woman who led the service, and two Prague residents who were originally from Russia.

Prague’s Jewish community was of course decimated during World War 2, Prague is a generally secular society these days, and Reform/Conservative Judaism don’t have as much weight among remaining European Jews as they do in America. So the small size of the congregation was understandable. And even with the small local turnout, it was a moving event — Jews from around the world, chanting Shabbat prayers together — very much alive, thank you! — in the building that was intended to be a museum of their extinction. I felt the congregants who built the synagogue would have been proud. It made me wish I lived in a place like Prague and could be part of leading a rebirth of the Jewish world there in an ongoing way.

This is all part of one strange aspect of vacationing in Europe: It feels like we are following a Trail of Dead Jews. In Amsterdam, we visited the Anne Frank House and two old synagogues that have been turned into museums. In Prague, we saw Terezin and a museum complex of several old synagogues and a centuries-old Jewish cemetery in the Jewish quarter.  So all these cities have their Jewish monuments and museums. But other than the sznagogue-museums, Prague’s Jewish quarter today is occupied by Gucci and Salvatore Ferrignano storefronts. In Amsterdam, you can¨t even see the quarter — it was razed for redevelopment and is now occupied by massive-scale plazas, public buildings, and a flea market. And no Jews.

Museums and memorials, but no Jews.

(P.S. Honestly, we have done things beside follow the Trail of Dead Jews! All the usual museums etc. plus some really interesting water-related tours with Sam’s counterparts in the Netherlands. And of course we still have the bike portion of our trip ahead of us, starting tomorrow. But I’ll write about all that later.)