Printer Friendly

Email to A Friend

Friday August 27, 2004

Guide takes travelers off the beaten path to Jewish Europe

by janet silver ghent
staff writer

While driving north from Heidelberg on our last day in Europe, we realized we only had a few hours left to explore the Rhineland. Would it be Worms or Koblenz?

I found the answer in “The Cultural Guide to Jewish Europe.” In addition to Worms’ fame as a cathedral town, the city is the home of Germany’s oldest Jewish community and perhaps Europe’s premier center of Jewish scholarship during the Middle Ages.

We crossed the Rhine into Worms and were richly rewarded, visiting a synagogue first built in 1034, a 12th century mikvah, a yeshiva where Rashi taught and the oldest preserved Jewish synagogue in Europe.

Before we left for Central Europe this summer, on an intense journey into family history and the Jewish past, I searched myriad online sites, history books and travel guides. The generic guides included the prominent Jewish landmarks: Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, the new Jewish Museum in Berlin designed by Daniel Libeskind, and information on the old synagogues.

There are also Jewish-oriented books, many focusing on nuts and bolts for the religiously observant tourist. Ben G. Frank’s “A Travel Guide to Jewish Europe” contains historical information, as well as practical suggestions for visiting countries from Portugal to Poland, with information on kosher restaurants and synagogues as well as sites. While it’s comprehensive, it’s not terribly attractive, with dreary black-and-white reproductions. In addition, it’s thick and heavy.

That’s why I elected to tote along the newly published “Cultural Guide.” Written by a team of writers, it has about as many pages as the Frank volume, but it’s lighter and livelier, with full-color photos of sites and artworks. It won’t tell you where to find a Reform service or a Jewish deli in London. It won’t give you the names of all the kosher restaurants in Paris or of the Jewish-friendly hotels.

Nor is it especially rich in personal anecdotes. For those purposes, I would suggest the folksier Frank book.

But if your focus is on Jewish history and civilization, the “Cultural Guide,” published with the assistance of the Jacques and Jacqueline Lévy-Willard Foundation, is an excellent choice.

Jewish visitors to Budapest are unlikely to miss the exquisite Dohany Street Synagogue, the adjacent museum and the Shoah and Raoul Wallenberg memorials. But in the Castle District of Buda, just down the street from our hotel, the “Cultural Guide” told us about the remains of a medieval synagogue in a building that is currently an apartment house.

Although the “Cultural Guide” focuses on Jewish sites and museums, it also points travelers to artifacts well outside the Jewish community. Why is there a Hebrew inscription on one of the statues on the bridge over Prague’s Charles River, for example? The golden letters, the guide points out, were “paid for as a fine in 1696 by a Jew accused of having blasphemed the name of Jesus.” And in Paris, the ceiling of the opera house was painted by Marc Chagall.

The book is organized by region, with subchapters on individual countries that begin with historical overviews before focusing on cities and communities. As in all guides, some things are left out — including the memorable Otto Weidt Museum in Berlin, honoring a factory owner who saved 27 of his employees from the ovens; and the Jewish Museum in that city gets only a photo and a small paragraph. For that reason, a serious traveler to Jewish Europe should pick up pamphlets in tourist offices and go on Jewish-oriented walking tours.

But the “Cultural Guide” is a fine primer, and I, for one, will continue perusing its pages to find out about the Jewish past — and my own.

“The Cultural Guide to Jewish Europe” (616 pages, Chronicle Books, $35).

Did you find this article interesting? Subscribe to our FREE newsletter and you'll be notified each week when "J." goes online. We'll tell you about the most important stories of the week and give you a link to each one.

This page contains a BETA version of Amazon contextual links. They are marked by the dashed underline.  Your purchases support our site. At times they point to items which are not related to the actual link. Please alert us by email if you discover objectionable links.