National Geographic Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern Europe

I wish I had found this book earlier. In the last few years we have been to several Eastern European countries doing our own Jewish Heritage tours. The amount of information in this book condenses what took me hours to find for previous trips plus more. As we read the sections devoted to those countries, we were able to relive our previous experiences and learn even more about particular communities and synagogues. We are embarking on another journey and thanks to this fabulous book, our entire itinerary with a wealth of information is before us. This is a very special book for anyone interested in the subject matter whether they plan to travel or are just interested in Jewish history.

Bought this for a friend who is going to Poland in April. She really likes the book, good info, and will let me know if it was a help.

Wow! This book is no mere travel guide! I had intended only to riffle through the pages. Instead, I read the entire book, unable to resist being carried along on a most remarkable tour. Jewish Heritage Travel is rich with information about the geography, culture, religions, architecture, and thousands of years of history in a part of the world that has deep significance for the human story. For, let's face it, shockingly horrible things happened here. While the book is organized like a travel guide, its dramatic impact is unmistakable and resonates with the reader long after the book has been set down. Ruth Ellen Gruber is a most compelling guide. Her descriptions of specific towns, synagogues, cemeteries, and "evocative remnants of shtetls" are not warmed-over fifth-hand accounts. She is forever scrambling over walls, swimming through weed grown fields, tramping through shin deep snow, knocking on doors, crawling through holes in ruined walls, and striking up conversations with strangers. One trusts her reports utterly. And she knows everything. Why Jews were invited into this area, or driven from that one, and when, and by whom, and who these people were, how they worshiped, how they differed from one another, and what their destiny became. She tells us about their land, their history, their architecture, their persecutors, their champions. She finds their cemeteries, describes their headstones, and reads us the inscriptions. If people were taken by the thousands into the woods outside their towns, shot and dropped into ditches, she tells us that too. Gruber's narrative style is intriguing. The prose is always crisp and objective with a reportorial attention to detail and an allegiance to fact, but sometimes it rises to pure lyricism. The result is a deeply evocative, richly detailed account and the reader finds himself on a journey that is both informative and poignant. The small black-and-white photos are remarkably clear and helpful, and are placed near to the relevant text. They are of an excellent quality. This is small thing, perhaps, but important in its effect. There is a good map at the front of the book. Within each chapter, and at each chapter's end, are numerous additional resources - publications, web sites, addresses of note, and more. The index is stellar. In the final analysis, this book is destined to become a classic of travel literature because it is illuminating in so many ways. Its readership should not be limited to a specific, relatively small group of travelers, and at the small price the book is offered, it needn't be.

Ruth Ellen Gruber's new guide gives readers the best of both worlds--interesting and accurate histories of the places covered and extensive practical information to help both more experienced and new travellers. Her introductions to each chapter (the book is organized by country) give readable narratives of each country's history, covering both general history and specifically Jewish history. She is great about giving multiple place names, a particularly useful addition in countries formerly part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Unlike general travel guides (and some Jewish ones as well), which often only list official synagogues in main cities, Gruber lists unaffiliated and independant organizations, giving as much contact information as possible. It's obvious that through her experience as a journalist, she made many contacts with people actually working in the communities listed. She also lists many sites that are no longer functioning in their original capacity--unused synagogues (or those that now serve different functions), out-of-the-way cemetaries, and former houses and businesses of local notables. Gruber seems especially interested in architecture, and points out particularly interesting examples of synagogue design and decoration. I especially appreciated Gruber's emphasis on visiting communities that are active and vibrant today. While the Holocaust did irreperable damage to once-thriving Jewish life, and while it can seem that Europe is full of remnants of the Jewish past, this book gives due time to the Jewish present.