Miriam Isaacs (Univerisiy of Maryland, USA) is offering a 3 week study abroad course (upper level) for undergraduates, (3 credits) from May 25-June 13th in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. We will be based in Prague. Interested parties contact the Study Abroad Office, see following website for application information and costs:
The deadline is soon so if you are interested apply in the next couple of weeks.
Miriam Isaacs
Jewish Studies -- Yiddish Language and Culture
University of Maryland
The Hebrew University has an amazing collection of illuminated manuscripts and incunabula.
One of these, the 13th century mahzor (holy days' prayer book) from Nuremberg has recently been put online. The pictures are lovely, absolutely phenomenal
One catch: you must download the DjVu Browser Plug-in which is located at LizardTech. It's free.
The home page for the site is here . It works best in Safari (on a Mac, and now available for Windows); I can't get the DjVu plug-in to work with my Firefox. Hint: click on the English to go the English pages, Hebrew for Hebrew pages.
Whilst laying pipes for a gas line in the village of Gvozdavka-1, in the Ukraine, workers found the mass grave of Jews killed during the Holocaust. Residents in the area had known of the killings (Jews from Moldava and nearby Odessa) but not the exact location of the grave.
Names of some of the victims have been established and it is hoped further investigation will reveal more names.
"About 240,000 Jews were killed by the Nazis in the Odessa region, according to Roman Shvartsman, a spokesman for the regional Jewish community, said Tuesday. He said a mass grave with remains of about 3,500 Jews was found in the region last year."
In first year, one of the things students do is conduct "research" into the East European communities from which their families migrated. For most, it's simply a geneaology experience, although some find landslayt -- others whose families came from the same city/region.
But today one of this year's student's shtetlekh made the news: from Bedzin, Poland a diary of 14-year-old Rutka Laskier was handed in to Yad Vashem (the Holocaust Museum in Israel). Her friend, Stanislawa Sapinska, found the diary which was hidden under the floorboards of the house. Rutka was later transported to Auschwitz, where, it is believed she perished.
The diary, which has since been published in the original Polish, has now been translated into English and Hebrew.