By David Lempert

The small cities of Eastern Europe where Jews were often one third of the populations and with other minorities usually outnumbered the locals, were cultural mosaics, with fervent discussions of cultural restoration and revitalization and of social and political models of reform—anarchism, syndicalism, and theories of communes and homogenization, as well as Zionism and rights protections.  They were centers of trade and commerce, science and empiricism, philosophy, theater and humor; a far cry from the stereotypical image of Jewish communities of bumpkin shtetl peasant farmers, and of pogroms, suffering and hate that immigrants left behind and are better off to forget.  The carriers of their legacy are famous today in the diaspora in Hollywood, in literature, in politics, and in academia; sometimes recognizing this legacy, sometimes not.  In Eastern Europe, today, the cradle of these traditions is disappearing as populations are homogenized.  In the diaspora those who fled are assimilating elsewhere or creating new national States that lack the same diversity and vitality.   

Jews are burying many of these traditions with the cemeteries that remain there.

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  • You won’t find discussion of the politics and secular ideals of Ashkenazic culture in many Jewish studies programs that focus more on religion and on the building of Israel. 
  • You won’t hear about them in the synagogues that are being reopened in Eastern Europe, largely by the Chasidim who are taking over synagogues and spreading their vision of Jewish life, though most Jews of the region were not Hasidic.  In the Jewish cultural centers of the region that teach Hebrew and religious rituals, and promote connection with the State of Israel, there is little debate. 
  • You won’t learn much about them at the Holocaust memorials that document death and memorialize suffering but do little to describe what was unique or special in that part of the world and how it can be kept alive.  Ironically, the focus is on protecting race and not identifying anything unique and special about European Jewish culture or the joint cultures of diversity that existed there. 
  • Museums of Jewish culture and heritage in the region don’t capture the spirit of social and political life because they focus on religious life and destruction. 
  • The secular traditions are even less likely to be found in contemporary European history programs and exhibits.

There is little effort to keep alive the special, positive legacies that Jews created jointly with a spectrum of other European nationalities: legacies of rights and tolerance, of social justice, of empirical science and social science, of lively debate, of creativity and experimentation, and of the several alternatives of coexistence that were offered to the world, other than homogenous globalization. 

This magazine affirms the Jewish mission of Tikkun Olum and has sought to preserve this culture in the diaspora, but there is still no real center for these ideas in the place where they thrived for 1,000 years before the Holocaust, and where they were enriched through interaction (positive and negative) with surrounding populations. These secular political, social, and cultural (humor) traditions are endangered because they are no longer rooted and propagated in ways that assure their discussion, examination, and continuity by the young. 

Recently, a group of academics have joined together to try to preserve this heritage of these unique cosmopolitan communities, from Odessa to Vilnius, from Sarajevo and Budapest to Kiev and Minsk. 

We have outlined a project for a special overseas research and public intellectual center that will be a place for interactive and intercultural programs with university students, for experiential tours and learning, for museum exhibits, for public discussions of films and political ideas, for publications, for application of ideas on contemporary problems, and for documenting and linking the different ethnic groups of the region and the peoples who left the region for America, Israel, and elsewhere, in a creative, applied, way. 

We are now looking for help to make this project a reality in Lublin, Poland. 

For more information about how you can be a part of the Diaspora Bridge Center of Poland project, contact Professor Lempert at superlemp@yahoo.com. 

Dr. Lempert is an attorney, anthropologist, educator, and author, founder of an NGO, Unseen America Projects, Inc. for democratic experiential education, and international consultant for the UN and international organizations on rights and sustainable development.