Jewish heritage

Reading Fred Kranz’s article “In Search of Family History in Poland and Belarus” (Feb. ’16, pg. 32) immediately brought me back to the independent trip my husband and I took to Poland and Germany in August 2002. We, too, were searching for the backgrounds of our families.

Our parents had been born in the US, but our grandparents were from Romania, Latvia, Germany and Poland. We had visited each of those countries, but on this trip we were looking particularly at Lublin, Poland, and Frankfurt, Germany.

In the Cannaregio sesteri (district) of Venice, Italy, the Jewish Ghetto will celebrate its 500th anniversary in 2016. (The current meaning of “ghetto” originated here.) The Ghetto and its five synagogues are under restoration. 

On March 29, the date the Ghetto was created in 1516, there will be an opening ceremony at the opera house Teatro La Fenice (San Marco 4387, Venice; phone +39 041 786677, www.teatrolafenice.it/site/index.php).

Tracing 1,000 years of the Jewish community’s history in Poland, The Museum of the History of Polish Jews (6 Mordechaja Anielewicza St., 00-157 Warsaw, Poland; phone +48 22 471 03 01, www.jewishmuseum.org.pl/en) opened in Warsaw in October 2014. The core exhibit, eight galleries totaling more than 4,000 square feet, includes models and reconstructions, artifacts, paintings and interactive installations. 

Near Munich, Germany, the wrought-iron gate at the Dachau concentration camp was stolen on Nov. 3. The gate proclaimed the slogan “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work Makes You Free”), as did the gate to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, which was stolen in December 2009. Recovered later, the Auschwitz gate had been cut into three pieces, and a Swedish man with neo-Nazi ties was arrested for having ordered its theft.