c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Between the end of World War II and the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, the 14 nations of Eastern Europe were simply lumped together as Kremlin satellites. Few Americans visited Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia or Romania, even though nearly 70 percent of U.S. Jews and many Christians trace their family roots to Eastern Europe.

For nearly half a century, the “Communist bloc” was shrouded in darkness and dread, a modern “terra incognito.” Yet I always maintained a curiosity about the “Old Country,” where my grandparents were born and where “Fiddler on the Roof” was set.

Feelings of tenderness and anger washed over me during my first journey to Poland in 1989, when I walked the streets of Warsaw and Krakow. I recited the mourner’s Kaddish prayer at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Eastern Europe was where my grandparents lived before virulent anti-Semitism compelled them and millions of other oppressed Jews to emigrate to America, Israel or other havens of freedom.

Before the Holocaust, more than 6 million Jews lived in Eastern Europe. The Nazis and their collaborators killed most of them. Today’s Eastern European Jews are symbolically and literally denying Hitler a posthumous victory. Hitler foresaw a “Judenrein” Europe, a continent “cleansed of Jews,” and he nearly succeeded.

Today, from Lithuania in the north to Macedonia and Bulgaria in the south, about 150,000 Jews still live in Eastern Europe and are miraculously rebuilding their communities.

In 1992, Ruth Ellen Gruber, a gifted American journalist, published an excellent guidebook about the Jewish history of Eastern Europe. Back then, she noted “little awareness of the rich Jewish heritage that still existed” in Eastern Europe.

This year, the National Geographic Society has published “Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern Europe,” an enlarged and updated version of Gruber’s earlier work. In the new book, Gruber uses both text and photographs to tell the extraordinary history of the region where Jews made significant contributions to religion, literature, politics, music, medicine and education _ despite systemic pogroms, persecutions and prejudice.

She says she wanted “to put back on the map places and monuments _ traces of the Jewish world that had been destroyed in the Holocaust and buried under communism _ that were totally ignored.” With few exceptions, she says, “Guidebooks and other material generally made no mention of any sites of Jewish heritage. It was as if they didn’t matter: as if, the Jews were gone, so who cared?”

Guidebooks and local histories would note a town’s 19th century palace and 17th century cathedral but would bypass the town’s 18th century synagogue, she says. Gruber has a special fondness for synagogue architecture, and she visited and photographed many houses of worship that escaped the Nazis’ destruction.

Gruber’s book offers important new information about current Jewish life in Eastern Europe, including data about museums, schools, synagogues, community centers, Web sites and books, along with a glossary of useful terms.

Gruber addresses the persistence of anti-Semitism in contemporary Eastern Europe, but she points out that “postcommunist governments have taken stands against anti-Semitism, and it is no longer sanctioned.” She even notes that “Israel considers some (East European) countries to be among its best friends.”

Gruber’s excellent guide is a must for people who want to visit Eastern Europe. It is clearly not “just a book for Jews.” Instead, it is a superb way to learn about a part of the world that directly touches the lives of many religious and ethnic groups.

Thanks to Gruber and the National Geographic Society, the Jewish heritage of Eastern Europe _ past, present and, yes, future _ is now available in a well-written and thoroughly researched book.

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of the recently published book “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us.”)

A photo of Rabbi Rudin is available via https://religionnews.com.

RB END RUDIN