#maciej from lithuania | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

hoshvilim · 5 years ago

Text

היכונו למסע צליינות וחיפוש אחר מקורות המשפחה שלי ברוסיה הלבנה – הן מצד אבא והן מצד אמא. הצטרפו למסע אשתי היקרה ואחי הבוגר שהגיע במיוחד מקליפורניה.

מינסק היא עיר הבירה של בלארוס (רוסיה לבנה) והעיר הגדולה ביותר בה. בני משפחתי לא היו תושבי מינסק, אבל מינסק היא נמל התעופה הראשי לכניסה ל״רוסיה הלבנה״. תולדות העיר משקפות ומשפיעות על בני משפחתי שהתגוררו בעיירה סמוכה (בוגושביץ) ומאוחר יותר בעיר סמוכה (בוריסוב). הפוסט הזה יסקור תולדות בלארוס, תולדות מינסק, הפלישה של גרמניה הנאצית, תולדות הקהילה היהודית במינסק, והשואה במינסק. אתרי הנצחת קרבנות השואה סביב מינסק:- אנדרטת הבור (יאמא), מאלי טרוסטינץ (Maly Trostenets Memoria) יוצגו בפוסט נפרד.

My brother, Prof. Benjamin Jerry Cohen, and I, have come to Belarus to reunite with the roots of our family. Our journey took us through Minsk (Yama and Maly Trostinets), Khatyn, Borisov, Shklov, Mogilev, Bogushevichi, and Smilavichy. This was our itinerary. Each city was reported in a separate post in this blog. One city has a sad “story” and another has a happy “story”. Borisov was the home of all our aunts and uncles on the “Cohen” side. Not one of them survived the Holocaust. On the other hand, Shklov was the home of our family on the “Grossman” side who were all smart enough to leave Russia before WWI. All of them survived in Canada. Bogushevichi was the home of our father for 23 years until he escaped Soviet Russia and immigrated to the USA. All his siblings were murdered in the Holocaust. My brother and I both want to walk on the ground where our father grew up.

מה אומרים מורי דרך על מינסק – What do tour guides have to say about Minsk

שדה התעופה הלאומי של מינסק (Minsk National Airport) מודרני ונקי. אבל בביקורת הגבולות בודקים באטיות כל דף של דרכונך בזכותית מגדלת ומצלמים כל עמוד (אולי בשביל קג״ב?). הנהיגה במינסק ובכל בלארוס פראית. כאן מותר לעשות סיבוב פרסה באמצע כביש לאומי של ששה מסלולים. אין בעיה לדבר אנגלית:- פשוט אף אחד לא מבין. לעומת זאת העיר נקיה להפליא והתושבים ידידותיים.

There are more than 20,000 rivers and creeks and about 11,000 lakes in Belarus but is a landlocked country. One third of the territory of Belarus is covered by forests. It borders five other states. Belarus is sometimes called the ‘Lungs of Europe’ for its countless forests, rivers and lakes. Belarus is not a member of the Schengen Area and is not a member of the European Union (EU). Belarus was the smallest of the three Slavic republics included in the Soviet Union (the larger two being Russia and Ukraine).

Some places in Belarus would accept Dollars or Euros. Normal payment currency in Belarus is the local BYR, but bring in USD or EUR. Bank cards are widely used in Belarus. You can use them in shops, hotels, restaurants and self-service kiosks. The most widespread international payment systems in Belarus are Visa and MasterCard.

New Belarusian rubles can puzzle tourists who come with euros in the pocket. The reason is simple – the new banknotes are almost similar in size, design, and even colors to the currency of the EU. So be careful and don’t confuse the two! All major streets are wide and are illuminated when it gets darker. So, even at night, you can feel safe in the capital of Belarus. Minsk is definitely worth a visit.

Christianity is the main religion in Belarus, with Eastern Orthodoxy being the largest denomination. The legacy of the state atheism of the Soviet era is evident in the fact that a large part of the Belarusians are not religious. According to the 2009 national census, there were 12,926 self-identifying Jews in Belarus. The Jewish Agency estimates the community of Jews in Belarus at 20,000.

כלל גדול בהנצחה בבלארוס: אחד מכל ארבעה תושבי רוסיה הלבנה נרצח על ידי הנאצים ימ״ש. כאן נרצחו במחלחמת העולם השניה רק ״אזרחי רוסיה הלבנה״ ולמרות שרובם היו יהודים לא מציינים את דתם.

בתי כנסת בבלארוס – Synagogues in Belarus

בסיור שלנו נבקר בבתי כנסת בערים בוריסוב ומנסק. ביתר הערי בנן נשהה כבר אין בתי כנסת.

Synagogues in Belarus

בית כנסת חב״ד Synagogue Chabad (פעיל-Minsk Jewish Community Synagogue – (Active

Synagogue Chabad Lubavitch of Minsk – ul. Kropotkina 22 – ул. Кропоткина, 22

בנין בית הכנסת הוקם בשנת 1910. במשך שנים רבות היה סגור. רק בשנות ה-90 של המאה ה-20 הוחזר המבנה לקהילה היהודית באופן רשמי.

Phone: 375-29-330-6675 Local Time: 11:16 AM (GMT +3) www.JewishMinsk.com Rabbi Shneur Deitch, Chief Rabbi Mrs. Basya Deitch, Director Meal Hashgacha: Rav Sirota

מחוץ לבית כנסת חב״ד- Outside Minsk Jewish Community Synagogue

מחוץ לבית כנסת חב״ד – Inside Minsk Jewish Community Synagogue

Synagogue furniture

מפה לבית חב״ד – Map to Chabad House

בית כנסת בית ישראל – Synagogue Beis Yisrael (פעיל-Actibe)

Synagogue Beit Yisrael – Daumana St. 13 B Minsk, 220002 – Phone: +375-172-345612

Paintings of once Belarus Synagogues in Beis Yisrael Synagogue – צילומי בתי כנסת בבלארוס המקשטים בית כנסת בייס ישראל

(All photos with permission of Beis Yisrael Synagogue)

בית הכנסת הריפורמי – Association of Progressive Jewish Congregations

Association of Progressive Jewish Congregations – Internatzionalnaya St. 16

בית כנסת קורל – Choral Synagogue (לא פועל-No longer a synagogue)

Former Minsk Choral synagogue 5 Volodarskaya Street now Gorky National Drama Theatre

After the revolution, the Choral Synagogue fell to perform exclusively cultural roles – it was a Jewish theater, a House of Culture, a cinema with 1,2 thousand seats and, finally, in 1947, the Russian Theater created in Bobruisk moved there. The building of the former Choral Synagogue, which was rebuilt after the war, where the National Academic Drama Theater named after Maxim Gorky is now located, now looks different. Fragments of the old masonry can be seen only from the courtyard. מינסק – צילום: Jewish-Tour

Where is Minsk – היכן מינסק

העיר מינסק ממוקמת על גדות הנהרות סוויסלאץ’ – Svislač ו-ניאמיהה -Nyamiha. כבירה הלאומית, למינסק מעמד מיוחד בבלארוס והיא המרכז המנהלי של פרובינציית מינסק ושל מחוז מינסק. בעיר מתגוררים כ-2,002,600 תושבים, ושטחה הכולל הוא כ-305.47 קמ”ר.

Minsk is the capital and largest city of Belarus, situated on the Svislač and the Nyamiha Rivers. The population in January 2018 was 1,982,444, making Minsk the 11th most populous city in Europe.

Minsk. Gift Card. Synagogue in the letter “k”. the beginning of the 20th century

The Name of the City – שם העיר מינסק

כתיב שם העיר משתנה בהתאם ללאום: בבלארוסית: Мінск, ברוסית: Минск, בפולנית: Mińsk. מקור שם ��עיר אינו נהיר. יתכן שזה קשור לנהר בשם Měn . אין קשר בין מינסק והעיר הפולנית מינסק.

Where did the Jews of Minsk come from?מאיפה באו יהודי מינסק

Jewish immigration from Germany eastward

תולדות מינסק – History of Minsk

youtube

The earliest historical references to Minsk date to the 11th century (1067), when it was noted as a provincial city within the Principality of Polotsk. In 1242, Minsk became part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. It received town privileges in 1499. From 1569, it was a capital of the Minsk Voivodeship, in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. It was part of a region annexed by the Russian Empire in 1793, as a consequence of the Second Partition of Poland.

Holocaust in Reichskommissariat Ostland, which included Soviet Belarus WW2-Holocaust-Europe.png WW2-Holocaust-ROstland.PNG יוצר WW2-Holocaust-Europe.png: User:Dna-Dennis מפת מחנות המוות בבלארוס

ההיסטוריה של מינסק דומה לתולדות שקלוב ובוריסוב: נוסדה על ידי העמים הסלאביים המאות ה-6 וה-8 לספירה. בלארוס רואה את עצמה כאחת מיורשותיה (יחד עם רוסיה ואוקראינה) של רוּס” – הכינוי העתיק יותר לארץ הסלאבים המזרחיים שמרכזה היה בקייב.

Rus’ principalities before the Mongol and Lithuanian invasions מפה: SeikoEn מפת האיזור של בלארוס בשנים 1220-1240

במאות ה-9 וה-10 נכלל ב-פולאצק. ב-1129 סופחה על ידי קייב. ב-1146 השליטה בנסיכות חזרה לשושלת פולוצק. במאה ה-13 נכלל ב-הדוכסות הליטאית הגדולה. ב-1569, יצר איחוד לובלין את האיחוד הפולני-ליטאי.

הדוכסות הליטאית הגדולה, מפה מאת טוביאס לוטר (Tobias Lotter)‏, 1780 Map of The Grand Duchy of Lithuania 1780

ב-1569, יצר איחוד לובלין את האיחוד הפולני-ליטאי-רפובליקת שני העמים – The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth

Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1582 יוצר: User:Mathiasrex Maciej Szczepańczyk, based on layers of User:Halibutt – האיחוד הפולני-ליטאי, הידוע גם כרפובליקת שני העמים

��ינסק שרדה גלי הרס נוראים. אפשר להגיד שאלימות בדם שלה. (1) גל ההרס הראשון היה הפלישה המונגולית לרוס בשנים 1237–1239. (2) גל ההרס השני היה במלחמת רוסיה-פולין (1654–1667). (3) גל ההרס השלישי היה במלחמה הצפונית הגדולה ב-1708 וב-1709.

ב-1795 לאחר חלוקתה של הממלכה המאוחדת של פולין וליטא, עבר שטחה של בלארוס לאימפריה הרוסית. בני העם הבלארוסי, אוניאטים ברובם, אולצו להמיר את דתם לנצרות פרבוסלבית, ונערכה רוסיפיקציה של התושבים.

בסוף המאה ה-19 אוכלוסית היהודים היתה 45% של העיר מינסק. היו יותר בתי כנסת במינסק מכנסיות. היה רחוב יהודי בו (היום נקרא רחוב קולקטורנאיה) רוכזו גלי הילדים, בתי הספר

ב-1915, העיר הייתה עיר חזית. מספר מפעלים נסגרו והתושבים התחילו להתפנות למזרח. מינסק נהפכה למפקדה של החזית המערבית של הצבא הרוסי והייתה בית לבתי חולים צבאיים ולבסיסי אספקה צבאיים. לאחר מהפכת אוקטובר ב-1917 הוכרזה עצמאותה של הרפובליקה העממית של בלארוס. בשנים 1918-1921 מינסק ובלארוס עברו ידים בין האדומים, הלבנים, הגרמנים, והפולנים. ב-1921, לפי הסכם ריגה נמסרה העיר לרוסיה ונהפכה לבירת הרפובליקה הסובייטית הסוציאליסטית של בלארוס – אשר ב-1922 הפכה לאחת המייסדות של ברית המועצות.

The First World War affected the development of Minsk tremendously. By 1915, Minsk was a battle-front city. Some factories were closed down, and residents began evacuating to the east. Minsk became the headquarters of the Western Front of the Russian army.

The Russian Revolution had an immediate effect in Minsk. A Workers’ Soviet was established in Minsk in October 1917, drawing much of its support from disaffected soldiers and workers. After the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, German forces occupied Minsk on 21 February 1918. On 25 March 1918, Minsk was proclaimed the capital of the Belarusian People’s Republic. The republic was short-lived. In December 1918, Minsk was taken over by the Red Army. In January 1919 Minsk was proclaimed the capital of the Belorussian SSR. Later in 1919 (see Operation Minsk) and again in 1920, the city was controlled by the Second Polish Republic during the course of the Polish-Bolshevik War between 8 August 1919 and 11 July 1920 and again between 14 October 1920 and 19 March 1921.

Under the terms of the Peace of Riga, Minsk was handed back to the Russian SFSR (Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic) and became the capital of the Belorussian SSR, one of the founding republics of the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics).

הקהילה היהודית של מינסק – The Jewish Community of Minsk

קהילת היהודים במינסק הייתה בין החשובות במזרח אירופה.התפתחותה דומה לזו של העיר שקלוב.

ב-1489 יהודי התמנה על גביית מיסים בעיר מטעם השלטון הליטאי.

יהודים התחילו להתיישב בעיר במאה ה-16.

ב-1579 המלך סטפאן באטורי הוציא אישור ליהודים לסחור בעיר. המלך זיגמונט השלישי ואזה ביטל אישור זה ב-1606 בעקבות פניית הנוצרים. אולם ב-1609 היהודים שוחררו ממסים מיוחדים.

ב-1616 הורשה להם לפרוס בעיר את מרכולתם.

ב-1629 הורשו לפתוח חנויות.

בזמן המלחמה הפולנית-רוסית (1667-‏1654) נטשו היהודים את העיר בעקבות הכיבוש הרוסי ב-1655, אך בחזרתה לפולין ב-1658 חזרו גם היהודים. עדיין ליהודים לא היה אישור להתיישב בעיר והם נאלצו לשכור בתים מאוניאטים, ועקב כך סבלו סבל כפול, שכן הופנתה נגדם שנאת הנוצרים האורתודוקסים, גם כלפי בעלי בתיהם וגם כלפי היהודים עצמם.

בלארוס הייתה ערש התרבות היהודית הליטאית, ובתחמה פעלו ישיבות מפורסמות. בהשפעת הגאון מווילנה (1720-1797) הוקמו בעיר מספר ישיבות. חלק גדול מהיהודים החרדים (אלו שאינם חסידים או ספרדים) שומרים עד היום את ההגדרה של ‘יהודים ליטאים’, שמבחינה היסטורית חלה על כל יהודי בלארוס.

במפקד האוכלוסין שנערך ב-1766 חיו בתחומי בלארוס של היום 62,800 יהודים, כאשר שתי הקהילות הגדולות היו מינסק ופינסק עם כ-1400 יהודים בכל אחת.

מפקד האוכלוסין שערכה רוסיה הצארית ב-1897 גילה כי בתחומי בלארוס של היום חיו 910,000 יהודים (הקבוצה האתנית השנייה בגודלה – 13.6% מתושבי הארץ כולה) היהודים היוו 21% בתחומי האימפריה הרוסית. הקהילה הגדולה ביותר הייתה במינסק (47,560 מתוך 91,494 – 52% מתושבי העיר). בתקופה זו היו היהודים הקבוצה האתנית העירונית הגדולה ביותר בבלארוס (59.4%).

youtube

עד למלחמת העולם הראשונה הייתה בבלארוס אוכלוסייה יהודית גדולה ובעלת תרבות מפוארת. הקהילות הגדולות היו במינסק, הרודנה, פינסק, הומל, מוהילב וויטבסק. בערים אלה היוו היהודים אחוז גדול מכלל האוכלוסייה. היה בה גם גרעין של השכלה כללית, שהבולט בחבריה היה חיים נחמן ביאליק. בשלהי המאה ה-19 ובתחילת המאה ה-20 שימשה מרכז לתנועת הפועלים היהודית.

בין שתי מלחמות העולם הייתה בלארוס מחולקת בין ברית המועצות לפולין. ב-1926 חיו בבלארוס (הסובייטית) 407,000 יהודים ומספר דומה של יהודים חי בחלקה הפולני של בלארוס.

בחלק הסובייטי היוו היהודים את הקבוצה האתנית השנייה בגודלה (8%) ואחת השפות הרשמיות של הרפובליקה הסובייטית הסוציאליסטית הבלארוסית הייתה היידיש. בתחילת שנות ה-20 התקיימו חיי קהילה ענפים, אך הללו גוועו עם הקולקטיביזציה והרדיפות של תקופת סטלין.

ברבנות העיר כיהנו והתגוררו רבנים מפורסמים וביניהם: הרב יחיאל היילפרין – מחבר “סדר הדורות”, הרב ירוחם יהודה ליב פרלמן שכונה ה”גדול ממינסק”, הרב בנימין הכהן שקוביצקי שכונה “המגיד ממינסק”, והרב גרשון תנחום ממינסק.

After the 1569 Polish–Lithuanian union, the city became a destination for migrating Jews (Ashkenazim, who worked in the retail trade and as craftsmen, as other opportunities were prohibited by discrimination laws). Many Minsk residents became polonised, adopting the language of the dominant Poles and assimilating to its culture. After the partition of Poland-Lithuania in 1793, Minsk became part of the Russian Empire. The Russians dominated the city’s culture. At the time of the 1897 census under the Russian Empire, Jews were the largest ethnic group in Minsk, at 52% of the population, with 47,500 of the 91,000 residents. Between the 1880s and 1930s many Jews emigrated from the city to the United States as part of a Belarusian diaspora.

הסכם ריבנטרופ-מולוטוב – The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact

לפני השואה חיו בבלארוס כ-750,000 יהודים, מרביתם בחלקה המערבי, שהיה עד 1939 בשלטון פולין. לא פחות מ-5,295 ישובים בלארוסים נשרפו ונחרבו על ידי הנאצים. פעמים רבות כל התושבים נהרגו – עד 1,500 קורבנות כענש לשיתוף עם הפרטיזנים.

ב-1939 סיפחה ברית המועצות את מערב בלארוס אחרי הסכם ריבנטרופ-מולוטוב. הקהילות בשני חצאי בלארוס היו שונות בתכלית האחת מהשנייה. יהודי מזרח בלארוס היו מעיקרם עירוניים, חילונים ודוברי רוסית – בעוד אלו מהמערב שימרו את תרבות השטעטל, היה בהם אחוז גבוה של דתיים והשפה העיקרית הייתה היידיש.

הסכם ברסט-ליטובסק. מקור http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Ribbentrop-Molotov.svg יוצר: The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact Peter Hanula

The Battle of Bialystok-Minsk – June 1941

This video examines a battle that involved over 1.4 million soldiers. The battle was one of the first engagements in Operation Barbarossa, and astoundingly decisive.

youtube

German Invasion Of Russia – June 1941

The movie from “British Pathé” below shows panning shot along road of advancing German troops passing retreating Russian prisoners. Various shots of German infantry advancing through smoke and rubble strewn town. Various shots of German tanks advancing through town (possibly Minsk) and across the bridge. Several shots of the German tanks advancing across Russian farmland. Burning Russian tanks seen in cornfields, prisoners walking along. Various shots of German heavy artillery shelling town of Brest-Litowsk. Various shots on outskirts of town, Russian troops with white flags surrender. Shots of large numbers of prisoners being rounded up and marched off. German troops in town mopping up snipers. Various shots of German antiaircraft guns in action. Flak in sky and Russian plane crashes into field. Close up shot of burning wreckage of plane in field.

youtube

השואה במינסק – The Holocaust in Minsk

כשהגרמנים פלשו לברית המועצות ב-22 ביוני 1941 כחלק ממבצע ברברוסה, מינסק נמצאה באופן מיידי תחת התקפה. העיר הופצצה ביום הראשון לפלישה ואחרי ארבעה ימים היא עברה לשליטת הוורמאכט. הגרמנים הפכו את העיר למרכז נציבות הרייך אוסטלנד. קומוניסטים נהרגו או נכלאו. ב-1942 מינסק נהפכה למרכז חשוב של תנועת ההתנגדות של הפרטיזנים הסובייטים. עד 1991 הייתה בלארוס “הרפובליקה הסובייטית הסוציאליסטית של בלארוס”, כלומר רפובליקה סובייטית בברית המועצות. באוגוסט 1991, אחרי כישלון ההפיכה במוסקבה, הכריזה בלארוס סופית על עצמאותה.

Under the Nazi occupation of the Second World War, working through local populations, Germans instituted deportation of Jewish citizens to concentration camps, murdering most of them there. The Jewish community of Minsk suffered catastrophic losses in the Holocaust. From more than half the population of the city, the percentage of Jews dropped to less than 10% more than ten years after the war.

אנדרטה בכפר הירוק לזכר מאשה ברוסקינה ושאר הלוחמות היהודיות שנספו במלחמתן נגד הנאצים – Holocaust Memorial in Minsk

Downtown Minsk – Belarusian capital, that was completely demolished in WWII by the bombings. The large building in the distance is an Opera House. מרכז מינדסק אחרי הפגזה

השואה בבלארוס הסובייטית החלה בקיץ 1941, במהלך התקפה גרמנית על עמדות סובייטיות במבצע ברברוסה.מינסק הופצצה והוורמאכט כבש אותה ב-28 ביוני 1941. ב-3 ביולי 1941, במהלך האקציה הראשונה במינסק, הוצעדו 2,000 יהודים בני האינטליגנציה ליער ונרצחו. האיינזצגרופן ביצע מעשי טבח מעבר לגבול הגרמני-סובייטי ותעד בכתב מעשים אלה.

Minsk-Juden Column of prisoners of the Minsk ghetto on the street. 1941 הארכיון הפדרלי הגרמני Blue pencil.svg wikidata:Q685753 Herrmann, Ernst – Bildbestand (N 1576 Bild) מספר גישה N 1576 Bild-006 אסירים יהודים 1941

הארכיון הפדרלי הגרמני Blue pencil.svg wikidata:Q685753 Jews in forced labor in Minsk. February 1942 יהודים אסירים 1942 Allgemeiner Deutscher Nachrichtendienst – Zentralbild (Bild 183)

youtube

בשואה הושמדה מרבית הקהילה היהודית. עם כיבושה של בלארוס על ידי גרמניה הנאצית ב-1941 הצליחו חלק מן היהודים להימלט מזרחה (בעיקר מהחלק המזרחי, שהותקף מאוחר יותר), בעוד רוב הנשארים נרצחו. לפי נתונים היסטוריים שונים, בשואה נספו 86% מיהודי מערב בלארוסו-36% מיהודי מזרח בלארוס.

Head of the Minsk ghetto Mikhail Gebelev ראש הגטו של מינסק

גטו מינסק -The Minsk Ghetto

The Soviet census of 1926 showed 53,700 Jews living in Minsk constituting close to 41% of the city’s inhabitants.The ghetto was created soon after the German invasion of the Soviet Union and capture of the city of Minsk, capital of the Belorussian SSR, on 28 June 1941. On the fifth day after the occupation, 2,000 Jewish intelligentsia were massacred by the Germans; from then on, murders of Jews became a common occurrence. About 20,000 Jews were murdered within the first few months of the German occupation, mostly by the Einsatzgruppen squads. On 17 July 1941 the German occupational authority, the Reichskommissariat Ostland, was created. On 20 July, the Minsk Ghetto was established. A Jewish Council (Judenrat) was established as well. The total population of the ghetto was about 80,000 (over 100,000 according to some sources), of which about 50,000 were pre-war inhabitants, and the remainder (30,000 or more) were refugees and Jews forcibly resettled by the Germans from nearby settlements. In November 1941 a second ghetto was established in Minsk for Jews deported from the West, known as Ghetto Hamburg, which adjoined the main Minsk ghetto. Above the entrance to this separate ghetto was a sign: Sonderghetto (Special Ghetto). Every night the Gestapo would murder 70–80 of the new arrivals. This ghetto was divided into five sections, according to the places from which the inhabitants came: Hamburg, Frankfurt, Berlin, the Rhineland, Bremen, and Vienna. Most of the Jews in this ghetto were from Germany and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia; at its height it had about 35,000 residents. Little contact was permitted between the inhabitants of the two ghettos. By August fewer than 9,000 Jews were left in the ghetto according to German official documents. The ghetto was liquidated on 21 October 1943, with many Minsk Jews perishing in the Sobibor extermination camp. Several thousand were massacred at Maly Trostenets extermination camp (before the war, Maly Trostenets was a village a few miles to the east of Minsk). By the time the Red Army retook the city on 3 July 1944, there were only a few Jewish survivors.

youtube

הגטו של מינסק – The Minsk Ghetto

בעיר מינסק הוקם גטו מינסק, שהיה הגטו שהחזיק הכי הרבה זמן בשטחי ברית המועצות הכבושים. יהודי הגטו הוצאו במספר אקציות להריגה בבורות ענק שנחפרו בקרבת הכפרים טוצ׳ינקה ומאלי טרוסטינץ (ראה מטה). ב-8 ביולי 1941 פקד ריינהרד היידריך לירות בכל היהודים הזכרים בשטח הכבוש בין הגילים 15 ל-45, כבפרטיזנים סובייטים. באוגוסט צורפו לנורים נשים, ילדים וקשישים.

Map of the Minsk Ghetto by professor Barbara Epstein מפת גטו מינסק

Minsk During the Occupation – מינסק כבושה

youtube

כ-11,600 יהודים במינסק נלקחו במשאיות אל הכפר הסמוך טוצ’ינקה (טוצ’ינקי) ונורו בידי חברי האיינזצגרופה א’. ההיסטוריון מרטין גילברט כתב כי הקומיסר הכללי שלנציבות הרייך אוסטלנד, וילהלם קובה, השתתף אישית בהרג במרס 1942 בגטו מינסק.

פעולות חיסול בשטחים (כולל העיר מינסק) שנכבשו על ידי הגרמנים מאז יוני 1941 נערכו במספר מקומות בולטים בבלארוס של ימינו. הקורבנות הועברו ברכבת גם לאתר ההשמדה ברונה גורה.

******************

Museum of History and Culture of Jews of Belarus – מוזיאון תולדות היהודים בבלארוס ותרבותם

Museum of Jewish History and Culture in Belarus is a small museum in Minsk, Belarus. It was founded in 2002 by historian Inna Gerasimova in conjunction with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. The Joint Committee and the “Union of Belarusian Jewish Organizations and Communities” supports the museum, along with the local Belarusian Jewish community. Offices for local Jewish community services are located in the same building. The entire exhibition of the museum consists of those items that were donated by local residents and their descendants. The earliest exhibits in it date back to the end of the 19th century. The present director is Julia Mikolutzkaya. [All photos with permission of the Museum]

Museum of History and Culture of Jews of Belarus

28 V Khoruzhey Street Minsk, 220 123, Belarus

Tel: 375298018635, 375172867961 [email protected] Opening hours: Mon – Sun – By appointment – Free admission

A virtual tour of the museum is available in English.

**************

פרויקט הנצחת זכרון השואה – Project Anne Frank and the Memory of the Second World War in Belarus

youtube

Video was created in Minsk on 27-29 of August 2015 in the framework of the project Anne Frank and the Memory of the Second World War in Belarus supported by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

*********

Belarusian State Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War – מוזיאון בלארוס לזכר מלחמת העולם השניה

The Belarusian State Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War was the world’s first museum to tell the story of the bloodiest war of the 20th century (founded 30 September 1943 in Moscow since Minsk had been evactuated). In August 1944 it was moved to the liberated Minsk to one of the few intact buildings in the destructed and looted Minsk. Today it is one of the most important and biggest war museums in the world, along with the well-stocked museums in Moscow, Kiev, and New Orleans. In those terrible years Belarus lost every third resident. More than 3 million people died, including about 50,000 partisans and underground fighters. Throughout the country there were 250 death camps, including the infamous Trostenets, one of the largest after Auschwitz, Majdanek and Treblinka. The museum does not mention Jews as such, only Belarus citizens. The audio guide does not include Yiddish.

Belarusian Great Patriotic War Museum Photo: Julian Nyča

*********

Minsk Holocaust Monument in Jerusalem – אנדרטת שואת מינסק בירושלים

אלפים מיהודי הגטו נמלטו ממנו ליערות הסמוכים ולחמו שם כנגד הגרמנים (למשל, מאשה ברוסקינה). אחרוני היהודים בגטו, שהועסקו בעבודות כפיה נשלחו אל מותם במחנההמוות סוביבור, או שנורו למוות בחודשים ספטמבר-אוקטובר 1943. כנראה, רק 13 יהודים שרדו את הגטו.

Minsk Jewery memorial at , Kiriat Shaul Cemetery’ Israel צילום: דוד שי

*********

Holocaust Monuments in Minsk – אנדרטות שואה במינסק

The monument to victims of Minsk ghetto at Pritytskogo street, Minsk, Belarus צילום:Vadim Sazanovich אנדרטה לקרבנות השואה במינסק

El Maleh Rachamim/G-D Full of Mercy/ Kaddish

שיקום הקהילה היהודית במינסק – Rebuilding the Jewish Community after the War

לאחר המלחמה חזרו חלק מן הניצולים לבלארוס. החיים היהודיים קמו לתחייה האופן יחסי בהשואה ליתר לברית המועצות. במינסק התנהל תיאטרון יהודי בהנהלת שלמה מיכאלס; בקהילות רבות הוסיפו להתקיים רבנים ובתי כנסת. בסוף שנות ה-40 של המאה ה-20 ידעה העיר התנכלויות של השלטונות לפעילות היהודית. בינואר 1948 על ידי סוכני הק.ג.ב. נרצח ראש התיאטרון היהודי שלמה מיכואלס, יושב ראש הוועד, בתאונת דרכים מבוימת . ב-1949 נסגר התיאטרון היהודי ועובדיו פוטרו. לאחר רצח מיכאלס ומשפט הרופאים ב-1953, חוסלה מרבית הפעילות. נוסף על כך, השלטונות הסובייטים עודדו יהודים רבים לעזוב את בלארוס ואוקראינה ולהתיישב בעומק רוסיה ומרכז אסיה, כדי לפתח את האזורים הללו מבחינה כלכלית.

ב-1959 הוחרם בית הכנסת הגדול, ובניינו עבר לידי תיאטרון גורקי. ב-1959 האוכלוסייה היהודית מנתה 38,842 נפשות. בשנות ה-60 נאסר על קבורה בבית הקברות היהודי, ולאחר מכן הוא נהרס ונהפך לאצטדיון דינמו.

בתקופת הפרסטרויקה התחדשה הפעילות הקהילתית. ב-1988 הוקמה “אגודת חובבי התרבות היהודית” על שם יצחק חריק. ב-1989 נפתח בית הספר היהודי החד שבועי על ידי יורי דורן, שלאחר מכן הקים את iro – התאחדות יהודי בלארוס. בלארוסים כחסידי אומות העולם. כל האותות הוענקו לאחר פירוק ברית המועצות. רבים מהמעוטרים באות הגיעו ממינסק, ועד כה כבר נפטרו.

בשנות ה-90 של המאה ה-20 התעוררו החיים היהודיים שוב; הוקמו בתי ספר במקומות שונים, ושבו רבנים לעמוד בראש הקהילות. לפני תחילת העלייה גדולה של שנות ה-90 היו בבלארוס 112,000 יהודים. בין השנים 1990–2004 עלו לישראל כ-70,000 עולים מבלארוס.

כיום קיימים במינסק שני בתי כנסת של התאחדות יהודי בלארוס – האחד מתפלל בנוסח אשכנז, והאחר של חסידות חב”ד, בראשות שליח חב”ד במקום הרב שניאור זלמן דייטש. עד ינואר 2017 הכיר יד ושם ב-641 חסידי אומות העולם.

מינסק בשנות ה-30 Minsk in the 1930s

youtube

מינסק היום – Minsk Today

youtube

Minister of sport and tourism in Belarus released an official video clip promoting spiritual Jewish tourism to Belarus. In Belarus there are buildings of formerly world famous yeshivas in such shtetls as Radun, Mir, Volozhyn, Baranovichy. There are buildings of former synagogues, few graves of famous Rabbis; the most often visited one is the grave of Rabbi Chofetz Chaim.

ביבליוגרפיה

IN AUGUST OF 1944 Russian-Belarusian WWII movie with English subtitles

יומנו השלם של אברהם זלמן כהן: Hebrew autobiograhy of Abraham Zalman Cohen describing Jewish life in Czarist White Russian village of Bogushevichi, Communist Revolution, escape and immigration to the United State, work in New York City and Peekskill, NY and building a family in the Jewish Community of Ossining, NY/

Forty Five Years on the Block – The Autobiography Of Abraham Zalman Cohen: אנגלית

מכתבים ששלח אליהו – צבי – הירש כהן – כגן מבלרוס אל בנו ואל קרובי משפחתו בארה”ב : Letters sent by Eliahu – Zvi – Hirsh Cohen – Kagan to his son, Avraham – Zalman Cohen, in 1927 through 1937

המלצה של הושבילים:- Jewish Tour Agency

The Jewish Tour Agency was founded in 2005 to provide the Jews from different countries of the world with the possibility to discover, to explore and to study the rich Jewish heritage of Belarus, offering offers group and individual tours over Belarus, Lithuania, Poland, Russia and Ukraine.

Minsk, 220002 Belarus Daumana 13B, office 7 Tel: +375 17 288 69 58 + 375 29 65 65 965 [email protected]

*********

All the links to our pilgrimage to Belarus

מינסק – Minsk

יאמא – Yama

מאלי טרוסטינץ – Maly Trostinets

חאטין – Khatyn

בורוסוב – Borisov

שקלוב – Shklov

םוגילב – Mogilev

בושאַוויץ – Bogushevichi

סמילביצ׳י – Смілавічы

מינסק – Минск – Minsk היכונו למסע צליינות וחיפוש אחר מקורות המשפחה שלי ברוסיה הלבנה - הן מצד אבא והן מצד אמא.

#Maly Trostinets #Minsk #The Pit #Малы́ Трасцяне́ц #Минск #אנדרטת הבור #בלארוס #יאמא #מאלי טרוסטינץ #מינסק

0 notes

courtneytincher · 5 years ago

Text

EU Pipeline Ruling Helps Ukraine Thwart Russia

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- A European Union court has undermined Russia’s strategic plan to eliminate its dependence on Ukraine for the transit of its natural gas exports to Europe. That’s another stroke of luck for Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy: Now he has a much stronger position in trilateral gas talks with Russia and the EU, due to take place later this month. And no long-threatened U.S. sanctions against the Nord Stream 2 project expanding the capacity of pipelines beneath the Baltic Sea were required to achieve this important result.The EU General Court in Luxembourg on Tuesday overruled a 2016 European Commission decision allowing the Russian natural gas exporter Gazprom PJSC to use more than 50% of the capacity of the OPAL pipeline, which runs from Lubmin in North Germany to Olbernhau near the German-Czech border. OPAL is an onshore extension of Nord Stream 1, the Russian pipeline laid across the bottom of the Baltic Sea, finished in 2012. Last year, Nord Stream 1 delivered 58.8 billion cubic meters of gas to Germany, more than its nominal capacity of 55 billion cubic meters and about 29% of Russia’s gas exports to Europe. Without the 2016 EU decision, these record deliveries wouldn’t have been possible. The gas needs to travel further from the north German landing point to reach consumers. But initially, in 2009, the EU only allowed OPAL to be built on the condition that Gazprom would be able to use just 50% of its 35-billion-cubic-meter capacity: The bloc’s energy rules require competitive access to pipelines. (Also because of these rules, which limit suppliers’ right to own the delivery infrastructure, Gazprom owns less than 50% of OPAL shares; the rest belong to Germany’s Wintershall Holding GmbH.) In this particular case, the rules make little practical sense. No one else delivers gas to the same point near the German city of Greifswald; supplies only become competitive along the way, more and more so by the pipeline’s endpoint. But because of the capacity cap, Gazprom had to maintain higher prices for Nord Stream 1 gas, giving competing traders no incentive to lower their prices. Instead of benefiting from the EU competition regulations, customers ended up paying more for gas.The European Commission realized that and allowed Gazprom to bid for more OPAL capacity. According to the Polish state oil and gas company, PGNiG, it allowed Gazprom to pump an additional 12.4 billion cubic meters of gas through Nord Stream 1. This, along with increasing competition from liquefied natural gas imported from the Middle East, the U.S. and, more recently, Russia, helped drive down European gas prices to a 10-year low this fall. The available onshore capacity has allowed Russia to go ahead with building a new pipeline, Nord Stream 2, parallel to Nord Stream 1. That project is opposed by the U.S. It argues that Nord Stream 2 would make Germany too dependent on Russia for energy supplies and would allow Gazprom’s exports to Europe to bypass Ukraine’s Soviet-era pipeline system, depriving that country of about $3 billion in transit fees just as Ukraine receives major Western financial assistance. Germany has ignored the criticism: It needs all the gas it can get to enable its simultaneous transitions from coal and nuclear power generation.But if the onshore pipeline network cannot carry more Russian gas, the costly offshore expansion makes little sense. And that’s the weak point at which PGNiG decided to strike.The Polish state company’s goals are twofold. Politically, the strongly anti-Russia Polish government is aligned with the U.S. It’s trying to drive Poland’s imports of Russian gas down to zero. But PGNiG is also vying for higher transit fees from Gazprom than the paltry $5.3 million a year it currently is receiving. It is, therefore, strategically interested in preserving the Ukrainian transit option. That’s why PGNiG challenged the 2016 commission decision in the General Court.“As Gazprom can no longer enjoy its monopolistic position on the OPAL pipeline, it will not be able to terminate transit of gas to Europe via Ukraine, at least in the coming months,” the Polish company’s vice president, Maciej Wozniak, said after the court ruling. Ukraine moved 86.8 billion cubic meters of Russian gas to Europe last year, and there’s no guarantee that volume won’t drop once Nord Stream 2 is finished. But any hurdles on the alternative route do force Gazprom — and its controlling owner, the Russian government — to maintain the Ukrainian transit option. That’s something Russia wanted to avoid starting next year, once Nord Stream 2 is operational and the current 10-year transit contract with Ukraine has run out.The European Commission has two months to appeal the court ruling, but even if it decides to do it (its first reaction was noncommittal), it probably won’t file an appeal before it engages with Russia and Ukraine on the future of Ukrainian transit after the transit deal expires at the end of this year. The talks will take place in Brussels on Sept. 19, and before the OPAL decision, Russia wanted a short placeholder contract with low guaranteed deliveries, while Ukraine insists on a new 10-year deal with supplies of 60 billion cubic meters guaranteed.The court ruling makes a sizable dent in Russia’s armor. Even if the reimposed OPAL cap doesn’t hold, Gazprom can’t be sure it won’t be hit with further restrictions: The EU’s competition rules are extremely unfavorable to it. These obstacles make it harder for the Russian supplier to compete with exporters of liquefied natural gas. Gazprom needs Ukraine to keep deliveries stable and retain market share. It may well have to opt for a sensible business strategy, even if it doesn’t quite fit President Vladimir Putin’s preference for using Russia’s power in the energy sector to put economic pressure on Ukraine’s pro-Western government.If Russia compromises and reaches a more generous deal with Kyiv and the EU than it has planned, Zelenskiy will be able to log a major success for his fledgling administration pretty much without lifting a finger: By winning in court, Poland, backed by Lithuania and Latvia, has done all the work.To contact the author of this story: Leonid Bershidsky at [email protected] contact the editor responsible for this story: Jonathan Landman at [email protected] column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Leonid Bershidsky is Bloomberg Opinion's Europe columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines

September 11, 2019 at 03:09PM via IFTTT

#Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines

0 notes

wagingmywarsbehindmyface · 2 months ago

Text

Kirył said that he sees the evolution of Maciej, now when they finished season 2. he sees him as somebody different in comparison to season 1 👀 he also said he let himself to have more freedom when playing him in s2… interesting… 🧐 he couldn’t say anything more.

#1670 netflix #1670 #maciej from lithuania #kirył pietruczuk

18 notes · View notes

sweet-god-almighty · 6 years ago

Text

Architecture in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union

2014

Kimberly E. Zarecor Iowa State University, [email protected]

Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are often associated with grey, anonymous, and poorly constructed post-war buildings. Despite this reputation, the regional architectural developments that produced these buildings are critical to understanding global paradigm shifts in architectural theory and practice in the last 50 years. The vast territory of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union covers about one-sixth of the world’s landmass and currently contains all or part of 30 countries. Since 1960 other national boundaries have existed in this space, including East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union. Given the region’s large size, numerous languages, and tumultuous recent history—communist and authoritarian regimes, democratic revolutions, civil war and ethnic strife, political corruption, prosperity, EU accession, and economic instability—a comprehensive summary of 50 years of architectural developments cannot be achieved in one chapter. Rather than survey individual architects or projects in depth, this chapter instead explores the shared transformation in architectural discourse and practice that resulted from the region’s political and economic shift to communism after World War II, and the changes that followed the fall of communism in the 1990s.

Countries include Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, East Germany (now considered Western European as part of a unified Germany), Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.

Architectural Practice during Communism

After World War II and the rise of Communist parties across the region, architects living in Eastern Europe and the new territories of the Soviet Union found themselves in a novel position. Unlike the lean years of the Great Depression in the 1930s, when most architects were left without work, they now had guaranteed employment and their services were in high demand for post-war reconstruction. Many were politically leftwing and supported the social agenda of the Communist Party, such as providing a minimum standard of housing for all citizens, whether or not they were party members. In territories that had been part of the Soviet Union before the war, architects also prospered due to the growth of the Soviet economy, a benefit of the expansion into Eastern Europe and the Baltics, and new investment in industrial infrastructure. Soon, however, the initial enthusiasm was tempered in Eastern Europe by the realization of the authoritarian nature of the regimes and the lack of professional freedom.

The professional lives of architects in communist economies differed significantly from the experiences of architects in capitalist countries. In this system, architects worked directly for the state or for state-owned enterprises; private practice was abolished. These changes first occurred in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and after World War II in Eastern Europe and the new Soviet territories. Communist economics relied on planning—the prediction of future input and output needs for all sectors, typically in a five-year increment called “the five-year plan.” This system relied on quantifiable targets and quotas, which forced architects to evaluate building projects in terms of material and labor costs—quantities of concrete and steel, number of units, volume of skilled and unskilled labor, and so forth. The experiential and formal aspects of architecture had no measurable value, and therefore had little relevance to design decision- making, except for one-off projects with political significance to the various regimes. As a result, architects across the region became technicians producing an industrial commodity, rather than creative artists executing an individual vision.

At the same time, and perhaps as a result, the social status of the architect diminished. Architects had once been at the center of the avant-garde (one can think of the Russian Constructivists and the Yugoslav Zenitists, as well as other groups such as Devě tsil in Czechoslovakia and Blok and Praesens in Poland), but during the communist period architects typically worked anonymously at state design offices where they functioned as engineers and managers more than designers. Those unwilling to accept new working conditions or unsuited to the professional environment took less visible positions at universities, historic preservation offices, archives, or consumer product enterprises such as furniture and industrial design companies. By the late 1960s, few practicing architects had any personal memory of architectural practice before World War II.

Because of this shared set of priorities emphasizing typification, standardization, and mass production, architectural practice across the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc shared more similarities than differences among the various countries by the 1950s. This represented a significant shift since Eastern Bloc countries like Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Hungary had sophisticated building industries before World War II, while the construction sector in the Soviet Union had been underdeveloped and largely unmechanized. New methods and processes for design, finance, and building construction were developed and shared between professionals in the various countries, often through travel exchanges and research visits. These architects also shared the everyday economic realities of communism: unyielding labor and material shortages; the push toward faster and cheaper construction methods; and the lack of long-term investment in public space and building maintenance. As János Kornai and others have noted, shortage was the system’s defining characteristic. Therefore, as in other sectors, architects focused on strategies to address the problems including prefabricated building elements, lightweight building materials, and the mechanization of work on building sites.

The consistency of architectural strategies across the region was remarkable both for the discipline that the economic model imposed on production and for the scale of construction (over 50 million standardized housing units were constructed in the Soviet Union alone from 1957 to 1984). Manufacturing and distribution were streamlined to such a degree that one was likely to find the same building and hardware components across large swathes of the region.

Stephen Kotkin, author of two books on the Soviet steel city of Magnitogorsk, writes this about the general conditions:

The Soviet phenomenon created a deeply unified material culture. I am thinking not just of the cheap track suits worn by seemingly every male in Uzbekistan or Bulgaria, Ukraine or Mongolia. Consider the children��s playgrounds in those places, erected over the same cracked concrete panel surfaces and with the same twisted metal piping—all made at the same factories, to uniform codes. This was also true of apartment buildings (outside and inside), schools, indeed entire cities, even villages. Despite some folk ornamentation here and there (Islamic flourishes on prefab concrete panels for a few apartment complexes in Kazan or Baku) a traveler encounters identical designs and materials.

R.A. French and F.E. Ian Hamilton made similar observations in their 1979 book, The Socialist City: Spatial Structure and Urban Policy, writing that “if one were transported into any residential area built since the Second World War in the socialist countries, it would be easier at first glance to tell when it was constructed than to determine in which country it was.”

This stress on sameness was also ideological, since the communist ethos of a minimum standard for all was integral to thinking about designing cities with undifferentiated class structures. Housing was the most indicative of this approach as a homogeneous housing stock of mainly two- and three-room apartments was built from East Germany to the Soviet Far East. The resulting buildings were not valued as architectural objects, but rather as indicators of production performance. Meeting quantitative targets was more important than evaluating what had been produced, thus removing any incentive to improve architecture on aesthetic or functional grounds. Mark B. Smith writes that “to some extent, this [mass-produced similitude] was the end of architecture” and “the final takeover of the profession by construction experts.”9 After decades of conforming to this system, Polish architect Maciej Krasiński had this to say in 1988, “the Polish architecture of the present is bad ... The idea of “maintaining a building” both as regards its function and its technological state practically is non-existent, and if here we add, to put it gently—the hopeless quality of the work—then the general picture provides us with no reason for optimism.”

This sentiment was widespread in the Communist Bloc, particularly in the 1980s, when economic and political crises led to even more acute material and labor shortages and worsening construction quality. The building technologies and construction practices developed for prefabrication and panel construction in the 1960s had not changed much by 1989. Economic planning in multi-year increments slowed down processes of change and innovation. Given the myriad architectural developments in the capitalist West in the same decades, this stagnation and failure to keep up with international standards became more apparent with each passing year.

Design Culture in Communist Europe

From the perspective of architectural form making, the buildings of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, have their origins in earlier struggles to find an appropriate architectural language for the “ideal” communist society. The Russian avant-garde provided the first images of the potential for communist architecture in the 1920s, but the style was later denounced as “bourgeois formalism,” and replaced in the Soviet Union by historicist Socialist Realism after 1933. Eastern European architects, many of whom had been trained and practiced as modernists in the interwar period, faced a similar crisis when pressure mounted in the late 1940s to embrace the principles of Socialist Realism to symbolize their countries’ new affiliations with the Soviet Union. The necessity to work in a Socialist Realist style was short-lived, however. After Stalin’s death in 1953 and Khrushchev’s 1954 call to reject Stalinist aesthetics and “useless things in architecture,” Socialist Realism quickly receded.11

Khrushchev’s “thaw” followed—the liberalization of the most repressive policies of Stalinism in politics, culture, and everyday life. With this change to official discourse, architects

were able to return to avant-garde forms from the 1920s and re-embrace the Constructivist legacy. A highlight from this period was Expo ’58 in Brussels when the Soviet, Czechoslovak, Hungarian, and Yugoslav pavilions showcased an unexpected new communist style expressed in glass, concrete, and steel. The change was striking to many given how recently the region had been associated with Socialist Realism with its monumental scale and opaque materiality. This new version of modernism was not a reimagining of post-war practice as something akin to the interwar years, but rather a revival of forms and concepts that had figured prominently in avant-garde circles such as functionalism, mass production, and prefabrication, now deployed in support of the communist system by architects working for state design institutes. (Figure 13.1) 13.1 Vjenceslav Richter, Pavilion of Yugoslavia at EXPO ’58, Brussels, 1958. (Photo: Archive of Yugoslavia in Belgrade)

In these years, architects once again adopted an internationalist perspective that sought out universal, rather than regional or national, principles for modern architecture including standardized building types and industrial building methods. This transformation occurred in many countries outside the Soviet Bloc, notably in Western Europe, but on a much more limited scale. Virág Molnár writes that by the early 1960s, Hungarian “architects were ready to accept their subjugation to industrialized mass production because they envisaged state socialism as an alternative route to modernity.”12 In fact, Western ideas about architecture and urban planning, particularly those derived from CIAM and Le Corbusier, were widely promoted and implemented by architects and planners working in communist countries. Exemplary manifestations of tower in the park urbanism and zoned cities can be found throughout the region. (Figure 13.2) As James Scott discusses in his book, Seeing like a State, this was part of the global phenomenon of post-war high-modernist city building, examples of which were found in capitalist and communist countries, and in developed and developing economies.13

13.2 Tower in the Park Urbanism in Bucharest, Romania. (Photo: Arhitectura 4 (1966): 31)

Architects in communist countries, however, had no choice about the direction of their work. The generation whose careers started around 1960 had few opportunities to challenge a consistent and systemic preference for typified, standardized, and mass-produced buildings. Prefabricated concrete—used for structural elements, facade panels, and exterior landscaping—was the primary building material available for the majority of projects, forcing architects to find creative ways to work with its limitations. Other components, such as windows, doors, and fixtures, were industrially produced in mass quantities, and in limited sizes and finishes, adding to the repetitive and uniform nature of the environment. Concrete facades were often left grey and undecorated, although better examples incorporated colored panels or carefully detailed window assemblies. For new housing developments in many countries, a portion of the budget had to be spent on public art, thus fountains, sculptures, and murals, often made of concrete and tile, were common elements in public spaces.14 Unfortunately these attempts to beautify neighborhoods were undermined in many cases by poor workmanship during construction and a total lack of maintenance in subsequent years that hastened deterioration.

Despite these challenges, there are many examples of good design work executed in communist Europe, although the architects themselves remain largely unknown. Rather than radically departing from conventions or expectations, these projects succeeded by using a restricted palette of building elements and materials in exciting and novel ways. Noteworthy examples in the Soviet Union include the Palace of Sports in Minsk by Sergey Filimonov and Valentin Malyshev from 1966; the Lenin Museum (now the Museum of the History of Uzbekistan) by V. Muratov in Tashkent from 1970; the Cinema Hall “Rossia” in Yerevan, Armenia by Artur Tarkhanyan, Grachya Pogosyan, and Spartak Khachikyan from 1975; as well

as the venues built for the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games which included the Dynamo Sports Palace and the Druzhba Multipurpose Arena (Figures 13.3–13.4).

13.3 Sergey Filimonov and Valentin Malyshev, Palace of Sports, Minsk, Belarus, 1966. (Photo: © Hanna Zelenko / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0 / GFDL) 13.4 V. Muratov, Lenin Museum (now the Museum of the History of Uzbekistan), Tashkent, Uzbekistan, 1970. (Photo: © Stefan Munder / Flickr / CC-BY-SA-3.0 / GFDL)

In Eastern Europe, the reliance on prefabricated and standard elements was just as fundamental. A few representative examples are the Spodek Stadium in Katowice, Poland by Maciej Gintowt and Maciej Krasiń ski from 1960; Przyczółek Grochowski housing estate in Warsaw by Oskar Hansen from 1963; the Federal Assembly of Czechoslovakia in Prague by Karel Prager from 1966; the Czechoslovak Radio Building (now the Slovak Radio Building) in Bratislava by Štefan Svetko, Štefan Ď urkovičč and Barnabáš Kissling from 1967; the National Gallery in Bratislava by Vladimir Dě dečč ek from 1969; the Palace of Culture in Dresden by Wolfgang Hänsch and Herbert Löschau from 1969; and Republic Square in Ljubljana by Edvard Ravnikar from 1977 (Figures 13.5–13.6).

13.5 Spodek Multipurpose Sports Arena, Katowice, Poland, 1960. (Photo: © Jan Mehlich / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0 / GFDL) 13.6 Štefan Svetko, Štefan Ď urkovičč and Barnabáš Kissling, Czechoslovak Radio Building (now the Slovak Radio Building), Bratislava, Slovakia, 1967. (Photo: Kimberly Elman Zarecor)

In terms of square meters, the design of housing and community buildings in new neighborhoods dominated architectural practice in this period. The planned economy

fundamentally changed approaches to housing design and construction as repeated apartment buildings organized in large districts replaced virtually all other residential types in most countries.15 Starting in the early 1970s, when the regimes finally acknowledged their collective failure to adequately raise living standards for the majority of residents, these new methods were deployed on a massive scale. In cities and towns across the region, low-cost prefabricated apartment towers sprung up creating whole new urban districts, and even new cities (Figure 13.7). In Bratislava, for example, more than 90 percent of the city’s 430,000 residents lived in post-war industrialized housing by the late 1980s.16 In the Soviet case, whole post-war cities, such as the 1960s-era car-manufacturing city of Togliatti, were built with prefabricated concrete.17

13.7 Housing Estate in Bratislava, Slovakia. (Photo: Kimberly Elman Zarecor)

A small intellectual class of architects rebelled against this standardization, and instead turned toward postmodernism and High-Tech in the 1970s and 1980s. They knew of these developments through architectural journals, either smuggled into the countries or available in the libraries of the state design institutes. The work of the Czechoslovak SIAL group (The Association of Engineers and Architects of Liberec) is one example. Following the Prague Spring in 1968, Karel Hubáč ek and Miroslav Masák, from the state-run design office in Liberec, established an independent design studio and began to train young architects. They called their operation the SIAL Kindergarten (SIAL-Školka). The studio’s work coupled the legacy of the avant-garde in central Europe with an interest in contemporary British High-Tech and engineered buildings. Hubáč ek’s own science-fiction-inspired Ještě d Hotel and Television Transmitter won the 1969 Perret Prize, awarded by the International Union of Architects (UIA) for its application of architectural technology (Figure 13.8). In the aftermath of the Soviet invasion in 1968 and the “normalization” period that followed, SIAL lost its independence and again became part of the state-run system in Liberec in 1971. But its architects continued

working and a group from the SIAL Kindergarten won the competition for the now iconic Máj Department Store in the center of Prague in the early 1970s.18

13.8 Karel Hubáč ek, Hotel and Television Transmitter, Ještě d Mountain near Liberec, Czech Republic. (Photo: © Ondř ej Žváčč ek / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0 / GFDL)

Unlike SIAL, which operated publicly and with state consent, many architects who wanted to challenge the official discourse were forced into secrecy. Ines Weizman writes about East German and Soviet architects who gathered in private apartments to discuss magazines illicitly brought into the country and to prepare competition designs that would then be smuggled to the West or sent to international architecture competitions, such as those sponsored by the Japanese journals, Japan Architect and Architecture and Urbanism (A + U).19 She positions these practices within the culture of dissidence, more often associated with literature and music, which was a critical development in establishing a theoretical basis for intellectuals’ opposition to the regimes in the 1970s and 1980s. Depending on the local political situation in their respective countries, these “dissident” architects were subject to various levels of retribution for their lack of cooperation. Some like John Eisler from SIAL went into exile in the West, while others, like Imre Makovec in Hungary, were forced to live in rural isolation. In extreme cases, architects, including Maks Velo from Albania, and Christian Enzmann and Bernd Ettel in East Germany, were imprisoned for their perceived architectural actions against the regime (Figure 13.9).20 13.9 Maks Velo, Apartment Building, Tirana, Albania, 1971. (Photo: Elidor Mëhilli) Architecture after Communism This was the state of things in the late 1980s when the various regimes began to fall. By the early 1990s, the European communist experiment was over and countries went through a period of turbulent change, including the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and the

Soviet Union, as well as vast transfers of state wealth into the hands of individuals through privatization programs. The architectural profession, centered for more than 40 years around a system of state-run design offices, had to be reinvented.

The transition was both conceptual and practical. Architects went from salaried employment in large public offices with regimented cultures to the capitalist model of private practice. Architects now had to find clients and financial backing for projects on their own, but they gained creative and conceptual freedom. The lack of intellectual rigor that characterized the state design system also had to be overcome. A high level of architectural discourse emerged into this void, particularly in Eastern Europe where many theorists and designers had continued writing in the communist period. Professional organizations and cultural institutions continued, active galleries and ambitious publishers dedicated to architecture appeared and numerous online venues for disseminating information sprung up in regional languages. All of which created a fertile intellectual context for the profession to make the difficult transition into the capitalist system.

Once the political and professional situation stabilized in the early 1990s, domestic and foreign investors were eager to tap into the region’s appetite for new buildings, especially in large cities like Budapest, Moscow, Prague, and Warsaw. By the early 2000s, this demand even reached smaller cities in less developed regions, like Baku in Azerbaijan, Bucharest in Romania, and Kiev in Ukraine, making this a truly region-wide phenomenon, except perhaps east of Moscow where the financial and social situation remained difficult.

In terms of building typologies, production since the early 1990s has focused on types neglected in the communist period or which never existed at all in the region—commercial skyscrapers, office parks, luxury apartments, suburban houses, boutique hotels, high-end commercial properties, and shopping malls. Such buildings fulfill residents’ yearnings to have what they missed during communism, not only the physical presence of new, colorful, and well-

made buildings, but also architecture practiced as a creative act by a known author. Financing for these projects came from multiple sources, both legal and illegal. Some were spurred by the concentrated wealth, influence, and political power that the privatization process generated, including money gained through criminal, deceptive, and corrupt means. This includes villas and vacation homes for rich oligarchs and ex-Communist officials, and office buildings, condominiums, and cultural centers financed with suspicious funds.

Investors in legitimate projects were often large international real estate companies, many headquartered in Western European, looking to take advantage of pent-up demand in the region. The real estate arm of the Dutch Bank ING was typical. In 1992, ING commissioned Frank Gehry’s Dancing House in Prague and then two years later hired the Dutch architect Erick van Egeraat from Mecanoo to renovate a nineteenth-century palace in Budapest for its Hungarian offices (Figure 13.10). In 2001, ING went back to Van Egeraat for the design of a newer 41,000-square-meter (441,000-square-foot) headquarters in Budapest. In the last 10 years, ING has funded a number of large mixed-use urban developments in cities such as Warsaw, and Liberec and Olomouc in the Czech Republic. Local entrepreneurs were also rich enough as the global building boom started in the early 2000s to commission commercial and residential projects, on their own or with international partners.

13.10 Frank Gehry with Vlado Milunić , Dancing House, Prague, Czech Republic, 1996. (Photo: Kimberly Elman Zarecor)

Rather than hire the local architects trained in the communist system, many large developers hired Western “starchitects” for their speculative projects, such as Norman Foster, Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel and Renzo Piano. Their work in the region included Nouvel’s Galeries Lafayette (1996) and the Potsdamerplatz redevelopment (2000) by Renzo Piano and others in the former East Berlin, Gehry’s Dancing House (1996) and Nouvel’s Zlatý

Andě l/Golden Angel Building (2000) in Prague, and Foster’s Metropolitan Building (2003) in Warsaw (Figure 13.11). 13.11 Jean Nouvel, Zlatý Andě l/Golden Angel Building, Prague, Czech Republic, 2000. (Photo: © Petr Novák / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-2.5 / GFDL)

Successful émigrés such as the Czechs Eva Jiř ícná and Jan Kaplický, and Polish-born Daniel Libeskind, also returned to the region and built successful practices using their knowledge of the region’s languages and building culture. More recently, specialist architects such as American retail designers Jerde Partnership and Austrian housing designers Baumschlager and Eberle, have also been brought in to raise the notoriety and technical level of new projects. Other developers, like the Dutch Multi Corporation, have stopped hiring outside architects altogether, and rely, instead, on an in-house team of unnamed designers to spread its global brand of commercial modernism (Figure 13.12).

13.12 Construction of Forum Nová Karolina by Multi Corporation, Ostrava, Czech Republic, 2011. (Photo: Kimberly Elman Zarecor)

A continuing interest in international architects can certainly be seen as a reaction against decades of anonymous design culture, but it is also reflects a desire to have some global status and proof of economic viability in the post-communist era. Not surprisingly, some starchitect proposals remain unbuilt because of inexperienced developers with overly ambitious designs. For example, Norman Foster had at least seven large Russian projects cancelled during the recent economic crisis, including the Crystal Island (2006) in Moscow, which would have been the world’s largest building with 2.5 million square meters (27 million square feet) of floor area and the Russia Tower (2006), designed to be the world’s tallest naturally ventilated building with 118 floors. There is also a scarcity of highly qualified workers in the construction industry and a

lack of government transparency and corruption in some countries. Recently this pattern—the preference for starchitects, corrupt politics, labor shortages, and a high rate of failed projects— has been repeated in Asia and the Middle East on an even larger scale.

Local architects have started to prove their potential to do work equal to their international peers. Some trained in the 1970s and 1980s have been able to adapt to the new conditions successfully, such as Vinko Penezić and Krešimir Rogina in Croatia and Josef Pleskot in the Czech Republic. There are also young practitioners, many educated both at home and in Western Europe or the United States, who are building reputations through small commissions and architectural competitions. One standout is the Slovene firm, Ofis Arhitekti, who started by designing innovative low-income housing in Slovenia and now have a global practice. Those looking to sample the region’s young talent can often encounter their work at the national pavilions of the Venice Biennale where the small size of the region’s countries allows for the work of many of the best designers to be exhibited. The ubiquity of English-language skills and the digitization of architectural practice mean that young Eastern European and Russian designers can now compete for projects outside their own countries, but so far few have made a name internationally.

Not surprisingly, the recent economic downturn has slowed the pace of development across the region and stopped the progress of young practitioners who are now struggling to find work. Some countries, including Latvia and Hungary, were especially hard hit by the 2008 collapse of the financial markets and subsequent crash of real estate prices. Cities and towns across the region were overconfident in the demand for new residential construction and currently have thousands of unsold units on the market. In many countries, residents have stayed in their communist-era apartments, spending money to renovate kitchens and bathrooms, instead of investing in costly new construction. The current situation is by far the worst in the former Soviet Union. Unlike countries that have joined the European Union, or the

former Yugoslavia which has finally recovered from the destructive 1990s, much of Russia and its former territories suffer from poverty and severe social problems. Little investment has reached beyond the large Russian cities on the Western side of the country or the oil-rich nations in the Caucasus Region like Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. Most Russians still live in unrenovated communist-era housing that continues to deteriorate with few options for financing improvements.

Contemporary Practice

Two examples suggest the diversity and complexity of contemporary practice in the region. The Jerde Partnership’s Złote Tarasy/Golden Terraces (2007), next to the Main Train Station in Warsaw’s central business district, is a mixed-use development with 232,000 square meters (2.4 million square feet) of office, retail, entertainment, and hotel space and 1,400 underground parking spaces. The complex brought an American-style mall experience to Warsaw with brands like Victoria’s Secret, The Body Shop, and Levi’s, as well as a multiplex cinema, Burger King, the Hard Rock Cafe, and two food courts. Its signature architectural feature is an undulating glass roof, one of the largest in the world, which emerges amoeba-like from among the complex’s more traditional office and hotel towers to enclose the retail space (Figure 13.13).

13.13 Jerde Partnership, Złote Tarasy/Golden Terraces, Warsaw, Poland, 2007. (Photo: © Kescior / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0 / GFDL)

Like many similar mixed-use projects in the region, including Jerde’s own WestEnd City Center (1999) in Budapest, it was designed to enhance the commercial infrastructure of a city that had previously relied on networks of small, poorly stocked shops and dismal office spaces. The city and ING Real Estate jointly financed the project, which was led by Chicago-based

Epstein in consultation with Jerde Partnership. Epstein opened a Warsaw office in the 1980s and helped shepherd the project through the complexities of local building codes and contractors. Like other large cities in the region, new construction is a point of pride for the city’s image. Złote Tarasy is just one of many new projects by international architects in Warsaw including an office building by Norman Foster, residential towers by Helmut Jahn and Daniel Libeskind, a museum by Finnish architect Rainer Mahlemaeki, and the German Embassy by Kleine Metz Architekten. In speaking about the boom in new buildings, and reflective of a general regional attitude, T omasz Zemla, Deputy Director of Warsaw’s Department of Architecture and City Planning, recently said, “we intend to build skyscrapers, yes ... to be honest, we want to show off.”21

A different view of contemporary practice comes through in a Russian example that shows the challenges of working in the region, especially when a building has national cultural significance. The new stage for the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg finally opened in May 2013 after 11 years of planning and construction. In 2002, Los Angeles-based architect Eric Owen Moss was hired to expand the theater by adding a second stage to the existing historical complex. His proposal, which included an exuberant glass façade that appeared to explode out of a rectangular volume, drew ire from the citizens of St. Petersburg and theater professionals and worried the Ministry of Culture who had to pay the bill. The ministry decided to fire Moss and then announced an international design competition for the same site. Moss was invited to submit a new design, but did not prevail. Instead, French architect Dominique Perrault won with his vision for a new theater volume encased in a web of gold filigree. Construction started on the project and work continued for five years, but by then only the foundations were complete. At that point, the government abandoned the design due to cost and scheduling concerns.

Finally in 2009, a second competition was held and the commission awarded to Toronto- based Diamond and Schmitt Architects who had to partner with local architects, KB ViPS, who

had been working on the foundations of the Perrault proposal. The new design, which had to be adjusted slightly to incorporate some already-built foundation walls, is a contextual and comparatively conservative project with a masonry facade that matches the existing streetscape. According to the architects, its curved metal roof with a glass canopy “gives the building a contemporary identity rooted within the context of St. Petersburg’s exceptional architectural heritage.”22 Unhappy with its less ambitious design, some locals have likened it to a “supermarket.”23 Even so, it is notable that the theater actually opened in 2013 after such a protracted design process.

Conclusion

The history of architecture in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in the last 50 years offers instructive lessons about the relationships between models of architectural practice and design culture. Communist economic planning imposed a set of priorities and restrictions on architects that were not formal, or even material, but rather established a professional culture through which a set of practices and standards emerged. This building culture operated for more than 70 years in the Soviet Union and 40 years in Eastern Europe. In this period, cities were created, expanded, and remade. Millions of modern apartments were built that still house the majority of the region’s citizens. However these environments were left to deteriorate without proper maintenance or investment. The last 20 years have been a period of reinvigoration and stabilization of these degraded spaces. For the most part, this has been a massive rehabilitation project, rather than the widespread demolition that some predicted. Thus Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have an imprint of their communist years that will not easily be erased, even as new building types and international architectural trends become the norm.

Scholars use the terms communism, socialism, and state socialism to refer to the systems in these countries. For clarity, communism will be used here. Political scientist Andrew Roberts describes communist countries as “ruled by a single mass party that placed severe restrictions on all forms of civil society and free expression ... [had] almost complete prohibition of private ownership of the means of production and a high degree of central planning ... [and] were committed to revolution and the massive transformation of existing society.” Andrew Roberts, “The State of Socialism: A Note on Terminology,” Slavic Review 63/2 (Summer 2004): 359.

1 note · View note