Ohio Jewish Chronicle, 1991-11-14

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THE
The Ohio Jewish Chronicle
Serving Columbus and Central Ohio
Jewish Community for Over 60 Years
VOLUME 69
NUMBER 47
NOVEMBER 14,1991
7KBLEV5752
•  DEVQTED   TO   AMERICAN   AND   JEWISH   IDEALS
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'Gala donor affair'
planned by Hadassah
page 2
J. Chomsky appointed
to head of Music Panel
page 4
Nancy Collins to speak
at NCJW Dec, 3
luncheon
'■. •■ ' page5
ADL announces plans
to honor Lee Fisher
page 5
CT, A. Banquet to honor
Jerome Schottenstein
page 8
E^RLY DEADLINES
Thursday, Nov. 28, issue
NOON, THURSDAY, NOV. 21
Thursday, Dec. 5, issue
NOON, WEDNESDAY, NOV. 27
The OJC office will be closed Thanksgiving Day,
-      Nov. 28, and Friday, Nov, 29.
■min The Chronicle ■h
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Community •.,..'............_.«.,.', 4-9
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Lifecycle . \.....,.....:.,... ,....... ,\ 10
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New Generation 12
Scoreboard ,,/..'.. 16
Synagogues .. ,.."....*... 11
Viewpoint ;.'.:..,- 3
Ohio'-Hist.Society Libr
1982 Velma' Ave .
Columbus, Ohio
43211 CUMP
The changing face of Jewish life in
Europe has been captured through
the lenses of three photographers
whose works are supported by the
Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture.
(Top left) In Southern Russia, an aging woman reminisces beneath her
photograph from a bygone era.
Photo by Frederick Brenner
(Bottom left) Youngsters at the Belgrade Community Center in a scene
from "Fiddler on the Roof."
Photo by Edward Serotta
(Top right) Kiddush in the sukkah of
the YanboL Synagogue in Turkey,
empty except during this festival.
Photo by Laurence Salzmann
CAPTURED ON FILM
Scattered pieces of memory
On the eve of the Holocaust,
the photographer Roman
Vishniac in the 1930s dramatically captured on film the life
of Eastern Europe's Jews—a
community and a culture all
but extinguished a few years
later.
Today, with the help of the
Memorial Foundation for
Jewish Culture, the historic
reawakening of Jewish communities in Europe and Asia is
being captured by three contemporary Vishniacs: Frederic Brenner, Edward Serotta
and Laurence Salzmann. With
Foundation support, these
young photographers are
chronicling the changing Jewish communities of Europe
and Asia.
Five years ago, Serotta, a
native of Savannah, Ga., first
set out to document the last
' Jews of Eastern Europe. With
the decline of Communism; he
has come to the conclusion
that Jewish life will in fact
continue—that there are real
grounds for optimism.
Serotta has lived in Europe
since 1988, first in Budapest,
then in Saarbrucken, a small
town in Germany near the
French border. He has travelled extensively through
Eastern and Central Europe
— some 100,000 miles by his
estimation — and taken 13,000
photographs, first documenting the remnants of Jewish
life, then capturing its rebirth.
He will soon publish a book of
200 of his photos titled "Where
is My Home? Jews in Central
. Europe." The Memorial
Foundation provided Serotta
with the initial funding for this
project.
The Foundation played a
similar role in supporting the
work of Brenner, a young
Parisian who, for the past ten
years, has travelled through
five continents under the auspices of the Museum of the
Jewish Diaspora.
Brenner, a Sorbonne-trained
social anthropologist and photographer, is obsessed with
the diverse forms of diaspora
Jewish life and with the desire, as he puts it, "to rescue
from oblivion the fragments of
Jewish history, to gather the
scattered pieces of our memory," This quest has led him
from Saana in Yemen to Djer-
ba in Tunisia, from Gondar in
Ethiopia to Bombay in India,
from Boukhara to Tbilisi to
Birobidjian in the U.S.S.R.,
capturing Jewish life among
the nations in countless photographs. Along the way, he has
lived for a year in the Soviet
Union, and has taken photographs in 15 Soviet republics.
■- Two volumes of his photographs' have already been
published and a third is on the
way. He has exhibited across
Israel, the United States and
Europe, including Moscow.
Recently he completed a film,
"The Last Marranos," drawn
about the converso Jews in
Portugal
Brenner participated in the
Memorial Foundation's
Nahum Goldmann Fellowship
leadership training program
and received a fellowship
grant from the Memorial
Foundation to further his
work.
The third photographer is
Salzmann, a native of Philadelphia, who is also a filmmaker and ethnographer; For
the last five years he has lived
in Turkey, documenting the
local Jewish way of life. He
has produced — a film —
"Turkey's Sephardim: 500
Years" — and an exhibition of
see MEMORY pg. 16
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