Lisa Schwartzbaum describes a recent Jewish “heritage tour” in Central Europe that visited various cities along the Danube River and explored their Jewish past and present. On her stay in the cities of Bratislava and Vienna, she writes:
[Bratislava’s] mournful Jewish centerpiece is the underground mausoleum of the rabbi and sage Moshe Schreiber (1762-1839), known as Hatam Sofer. The cemetery in which he was buried—itself built atop a 17th-century Jewish graveyard—was upended during and after World War II. But the rabbi’s tomb survived, along with the graves of some twenty other rabbis, albeit shut away under a concrete tunnel.
The site was reconstructed and rededicated in 2002, in all its gloomy, claustrophobic, end-of-the-line pathos. The old Jewish neighborhood, meanwhile, was smashed decades ago by Communist construction—ugly in intention and result. There are very few Jews and an army of shadows in this exhausted Slovakian city. . . .
[The next day], we were in Vienna, as rigorously stately and aloof in its elegance as Bratislava is exasperated and down at the heel. Ah, Vienna, where vanished Jewish life leaves a uniquely conflicted legacy, a mixture of pride and humiliation, sophistication and hurt.
At the bright, modern Jewish Museum Vienna, visitors’ bags and passports were examined with grim concentration. But then, at Vienna’s main synagogue, . . . our crowd had the great luck to arrive in time for a Thursday bar mitzvah. The young man was from a Bukharan family—immigrants from Eastern Europe, Russia, and former Soviet republics are the last best hope for restocking Jewish places of worship in the region—and we were thrilled to join in the traditional pelting of the bar-mitzvah boy with a volley of little candies. Later, the clan’s granny broke away from a family celebration in the synagogue vestibule to offer us slices of sweet melon.
Read more on New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/15/travel/tracing-jewish-heritage-along-the-danube.html