The Posthumous Landscape
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THE Jewish Historical POSTHUMOUS Sites in Poland and LANDSCAPE Western Ukraine Photographs by December 2019 to David Kaufman April 2020 CONGREGATION GUIDE DARCHEI NOAM TO THE 864 Sheppard Ave. West, EXHIBITION Toronto, Ontario M3H 2T5 www.davidkaufmanphotography.com work in adjacent countries, and in June 2016, over three weeks, I explored the western Ukrainian cities of Lviv and Artist’s Statement Chernivtsi and their surroundings, also drawn to the area by its abundant Jewish material culture. O long since the wagons the wagons the wagons Photographically, I find the subject matter emotionally have run over that landscape and killed it engaging, challenging to depict, and often beautiful. The but posthumous it lasts unpunished to this day cemeteries especially are remarkable for the quality of there are no witnesses they have perished.... the memorial art and their forested environments. But ~ From “Posthumous Landscape” in A Reading of my motivation for engaging in this work goes beyond the Ashes, by Polish poet Jerzy Ficowski, 1979 aesthetic rewards of creating and exhibiting striking images. Outside of the major urban centres, Poland and Western he landscapes of Poland and western Ukraine offer Ukraine are mostly devoid of Jewish inhabitants. However, Tsubstantial rewards to the Jewish traveller seeking a the quantity of Jewish material culture is vast, the task of connection with what existed before the great catastrophe cataloguing, preserving, and restoring Jewish artifacts is of the Hitler years, but how one feels about what is on offer seemingly limitless, and the resources available are largely depends on what each traveller is seeking. Many immigrants inadequate. For instance, even in cemeteries that are being from Europe who left Poland or Ukraine before the Holocaust cared for in some fashion, countless brilliant examples of and most who survived those years and settled elsewhere as carved gravestones are being eroded by time and exposure refugees could not bear the thought of returning to lands to the elements, with no existing plan to reverse the course they regarded as vast graveyards. But their children and of destruction and loss of this artistic heritage. grandchildren, Jews of the post-war generations in North In that context, the act of photographing Jewish sites America and Israel, have been “returning” to Eastern acquires an imperative greater than the realization of Europe in ever-increasing numbers since the late 1970s and artistic ambition. Documentation is valuable not only especially since the fall of Communism. For many the quest for the historical record but also to spur awareness of the is to get a glimpse of or set foot in the ancestral home, or to treasures of a lost, Jewish civilization and to encourage see and touch gravestones in the family memorial plot, or efforts at preservation. This is what motivates me and a to hold in their hands family records in state or provincial small number of other serious photographers who share archives. For some it is thrilling just to breathe the same a love for this subject matter. There is no question that, if atmosphere as their grandparents or great grandparents, to previous experience is any indication, as time goes on these inhabit the same space, to tread the same path. Jewish historical sites will change, many will deteriorate For those who set out with avocational or professional and be lost, and decades hence, photographs will be all that goals—academics, journalists, filmmakers, artists—the remain to remind us of many of these places. Seen in that quest entails other desires and activities. I have had a dual light, the images in this exhibition are not only an important career, as a documentary filmmaker, including eighteen record of what existed in the past but also a fulfillment of an years at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and as a obligation to Jewish generations of the future. photographer, specializing in architecture-based images. DAVID KAUFMAN, March 2019 For a long time I struggled to express my Jewish identity in my work. I made my first trip to Poland in 1992 for CBC’s The Fifth Estate to videotape a program about hidden child survivors of the Holocaust, and two more trips a decade later to make films about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and the Lodz Ghetto. On all these occasions I was unexpectedly Biographical surprised and deeply moved by both the quality and quantity of Jewish material culture, remnants of Jewish life, that I saw avid Kaufman is a photographer and filmmaker based wherever I went in Poland. Din Toronto. His photographic work focuses primarily The Jewish cemeteries in Warsaw and Lodz made an on architecture and the urban landscape. His 2013 photo enormous impression on me. After completing my exhibition depicting Toronto heritage streetscapes, documentary film work in Lodz I returned to Poland Early Sunday Morning, was named a must-see show of in late 2007 to begin a long-term project to photograph the prestigious CONTACT Photo Festival by Toronto those memorial sites. That was the first of eight visits to Life and NOW Magazine. His other recent exhibitions Poland for still photography, in which I have documented include: Architectural Devolution: Industrial Buildings in numerous Jewish cemeteries, synagogues, and other a Post-Industrial World, Built to Last: Montreal’s Enduring Jewish architecture, former Jewish neighbourhoods and Architecture, and Vessels of Song: Faces of New Jewish ghettos, sites related to the Holocaust, and other artifacts Music. Other major photographic projects include ongoing of Jewish life. It was a logical progression to continue this work in Eastern Europe on Jewish historical sites, work on 2 Toronto’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery, and on the Spadina and independent film sector. Kaufman’s documentaries have Kensington area of the city. appeared on CBC, PBS, Bravo! and the History Channel and include feature programs about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising Kaufman’s first film was the widely distributed biography and the Klezmer music revival. His most recent film, Song A. M. Klein: The Poet as Landscape. He subsequently spent of the Lodz Ghetto, is a feature length work about the Lodz eighteen years at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Ghetto and its famous street singer, Yankele Herszkowicz, working as a producer/director on two of its top programs, with music performed by Brave Old World. The Journal and The Fifth Estate, before moving to the INTRODUCTION: Warsaw, Lodz, Lviv, Chernivtsi n central Lviv (known formerly as Lvov and Lemberg), the city’s pre-war Jewish population. Krakow sees hundreds if you know where to look, you can see commercial of thousands of Jewish tourists annually, many on the way Iinscriptions on the sides of buildings in Yiddish, some to or from visits to Auschwitz-Birkenau, but its permanent, clear and restored, some faded, some barely legible, often native Jewish population numbers in the hundreds. And referred to as “ghost” signs, left over from the past when the Jewish residents of Lodz, Lviv, and Chernivtsi number Yiddish was one of the major languages of commerce of the no more than two thousand each. Yet today, more than city. These signs—advertising milk, or coffee, or hats—are ever in the post-Holocaust period, these cities and their a tangible reminder of the ghostly Jewish presence in Lviv, surrounding regions loom large in the Jewish imagination. unrecognized by most of the population, but visible to those For the children of Polish Jews “returning” to Poland, or for who have the inclination to study the city’s past or who other Jewish tourists seeking to connect with the land of already possess an awareness of the historical importance origin of so many families of its pre-Holocaust Jewish in Jewish communities community. Indeed, both in the Diaspora and for the Jewish tourist in in Israel, Warsaw presents eastern Europe, of which the greatest paradox: The photographers form a largest centre of Jewish purposeful subgenus, the life in Europe before act of wandering through the Second World War what I have called the is the most barren in Posthumous Landscape terms of Jewish material is an exercise in chasing culture, with one major ghostly forms, hidden exception—its remarkable spirits and phantoms, all Jewish cemetery. Warsaw, remnants of a vanished once home to 375,000 Jews, civilization. was almost completely Warsaw, Lodz, and Lviv, destroyed in the aftermath along with Krakow and of its two great uprisings, Vilnius (Vilne) were the the Ghetto resistance fight largest centres of Jewish life in April-May 1943, and the in the reconstituted Polish insurrection by the Polish state during the interwar Yiddish commercial signage in central Lviv underground army in period. Chernivtsi (the August 1944. Hardly any Ukrainian name for Czernowitz) was a major Jewish centre buildings or architectural artifacts survive in central Warsaw in the province of Bukovina under Austro-Hungarian rule, from the pre-war era, just a handful, and the street map of which fell under Romanian control after the First World the former Ghetto area has been completely altered by post- War. Today, among these cities there is a significant Jewish war reconstruction layered upon the rubble left over from presence only in Warsaw but that presence is a tiny fraction of the conflict. Notwithstanding the recent opening of the 3 impressive Polin Museum of Polish Jewish History, the most In Chernivtsi prior to the Holocaust, the Jewish community moving site in Jewish Warsaw today still is the Okopowa made up forty percent of the population. Large areas of the Street cemetery, a great garden of history, with over 225,000 city were populated by Jews who were active in every aspect of burial sites and innumerable monuments, in which the city life.