Chủ Nhật, 31 tháng 7, 2011

National Revolutionary Martyr's Shrine (忠烈祠) at Taipei, Taiwan

The National Revolutionary Martyr's Shrine (N25.07826 E121.53358) is located at the roundabout along the BeiAn Road of Taipei, Taiwan.

The Martyr's Shrine of Taipei

"The Martyr’s Shrine was built to commemorate soldiers who sacrificed their lives for the country during the War of Resistance against Japan and Civil War between Nationalist Government and the Communist Party. The Martyr’s Shrine was built in 1969, with the main architecture designed similar to Taihe Dian Imperial Palace in Beijing. The grand design symbolizes the braveness and selfless spirits of the martyrs. Covering a large area, with mountains nearby and facing Keelung River, the Martyr’s Shrine is a significant attraction noting the history and culture of Taiwan." Source from here.

When we reached the shrine, the timing was just Nice! The Military Soldiers Officers just about to change their shift. The Martyr's Shrine visit by many tourists everyday, one of the purpose is to witness the Officers changing shift.

The Military Police Officers of Martyr's Shrine

It was cloudy that day...and once the officers started to move, everyone (tourists) were just follow...

I was amazed with their movement, perfect synchronized!

Do you notice the three dark lines on the floor? That were their footsteps...everyday and every hour!
We were just follow the Police (Soldiers) Officers side by side until they reached the Shrine...

The Martyr's Shrine

And everyone were just stand and watching the shift changing quitely...

You can notice there were two soldiers standing on the both side of the entrance...and there were some kind of ceremony before the soldiers change.


Then they walked out the Shrine...

Well, everyone follow the soldiers again from the Shrine towards the main entrance...before the main entrance, there were some kind of 'performance' that they changing their rifles 'in the air'!


Then the soldiers just stand at the both side of the entrance motionless! Yes! For another hour...Salute!


Seems like she (tourist) wanted learn about the soldiers...:)

I captured a short moment of the Soldiers from my phone below...


If you like to know the history about the Martyr's Shrine, please click here.

Related post :-
*  My Taiwan Trip on May, 2011

The Location map of National Revolutionary Martyr's Shrine at Taipei, Taiwan.


Thứ Ba, 26 tháng 7, 2011

Poland: New cemetery signage in Lutowiska and Starachowice


Lutowiska. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

I posted recently on the exemplary fashion in which Jewish heritage sites are cared for and put on local tourism and heritage itineraries in the remote village of Lutowiska in the far southeast corner of Poland.

There is even more signage point the way to the Jewish cemetery there now,  thanks to the support of the Michael Traison Fund for Poland, the Community Office of Lutowiska and the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland (FODZ) which erected a new information plaque and road sign.

Michael's fund,  the FODZ and the Town Office of Starachowice  also put up two new road signs  marking the way to the local Jewish cemetery there (where I have never been). 

Poland: Oswiecim, the city of Auschwitz, wrestles with whether the past must be part of its future

My latest JTA story is about Oswiecim, the town outside of which Auschwitz was built.


Woman walks her baby in front of the Auschwitz Jewish Center. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber


By Ruth Ellen Gruber

JTA, July 21, 2011

OSWIECIM, Poland (JTA) -- Can a town that exists in the shadow of death transform itself into a place of normalcy?

The question long has vexed Oswiecim, the town of 40,000 in southern Poland where the notorious Auschwitz death camp is located.

For decades, residents and city leaders have struggled to separate Oswiecim from Auschwitz and pull the town, its history and its cultural associations out from under the overwhelming black cloud of the death camp, which is now a memorial museum.

With only limited success to date, however, a new generation of town leaders is trying a different tack: bolstering Oswiecim as a vital local community, but also reaching out to connect with Auschwitz rather than disassociate from it.

"Ten or 15 years ago, many of us began thinking that the way to go was not to reject Auschwitz but to deal with it," said historian Artur Szyndler, 40, the director of research and education at the Auschwitz Jewish Center who grew up in Oswiecim under communism.

The town has adopted "City of Peace" as its official slogan. And for years a Catholic-run Dialogue and Prayer Center and a German-run International Youth Center near the camp have promoted reflection and reconciliation.

Downtown, the 10-year-old Auschwitz Jewish Center makes clear that before the Holocaust, Oswiecim had a majority Jewish population and was known widely by its Yiddish name, Oshpitzin. The center includes a Jewish museum and a functioning refurbished synagogue -- the only one in the city to survive. It runs study programs and serves as a meeting place for visiting groups.

And now the Oswiecim Life Festival, founded last year by Darek Maciborek, a nationally known radio DJ who was born and lives in Oswiecim, aims to use music and youth culture to fight anti-Semitism and racism.

"This place seems to be perfectly fitting for initiatives with a message of peace," Maciborek said. "A strong voice from this place is crucial."

The closing concert of this year's festival, held in June, included the Chasidic reggae star Matisyahu. He gave a midnight performance for a crowd of 10,000 in a rainswept stadium just a couple of miles from the notorious "Arbeit Macht Frei" ("work sets you free") gate of the death camp.

"It was an incredibly symbolic moment," Oswiecim City Council President Piotr Hertig told JTA. "It was a very important symbol that a religious Jew was performing at a festival in such a place."

Hertig said the new push to bolster Oswiecim and reach out more to the Auschwitz museum and its visitors is partly due to a generational shift in the town.

For a long time, most of Oswiecim's population consisted of thousands of newcomers from elsewhere in Poland who settled here after World War II. But today's community leaders increasingly include 30- and 40-somethings like Hertig and Maciberok who were born in Oswiecim and feel rooted here.

The town now has plans to go ahead with several projects that had been thwarted by outgoing Mayor Janusz Marszalek, who had particularly strained relations with the Auschwitz Memorial, according to Hertig. These include a new visitors' center for the memorial and a park on the riverbank just opposite Auschwitz that will be connected to the camp memorial by a foot bridge.

"This will be a very good place for people to come after visiting Auschwitz and Birkenau, where they can meditate, reflect and soothe their negative emotions," Hertig said.

Hertig said he hoped new programs and study visits developed with the Auschwitz memorial will encourage longer stays by visitors. Plans are in the works to build an upscale hotel in town and refurbish the main market square and other infrastructure.

"Auschwitz, on our outskirts, is the symbol of the greatest evil," Hertig said. "But at the same time we want to show to others that Oswiecim is a town with an 800-year history that wants to be a normal living town."

Located on the opposite side of the Sola River from the Auschwitz camp, Oswiecim has an old town center with a pleasant market square, several imposing churches, and a medieval castle and tower. In the modern part of town is a new shopping mall and state-of-the-art public library, as well as a big civic culture center that hosts a variety of events, including an annual Miss Oswiecim beauty pageant.

But few of the more than 1.2 million people who visit the Auschwitz camp each year ever set foot in Oswiecim or even know that the town exists.

"It is difficult to comprehend what it must be like to call this city your hometown," said Jody Manning, a doctoral student at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., who is writing a dissertation on life in Oswiecim and Dachau, Germany, also the site of a concentration camp.

Local residents long have resented that most outsiders make no distinction between their town and the death camp.

"People from outside are sometimes shocked. They ask how I can live in Auschwitz. But I don't -- I live in Oswiecim," said Gosia, a 30-year-old woman who works at the Catholic Dialogue Center. "This is Oswiecim, my hometown -- not Auschwitz!"

It remains to be seen whether the new push can help remove the stigma from Oswiecim and achieve a less strained modus vivendi with the death camp memorial. "People have the right to live normally, but I don't think they'll be able to disassociate from Auschwitz," said Stanislaw Krajewski, a leading Polish Jewish intellectual. "The best they can do is to use it in a constructive way; the very name Auschwitz has a magical power."

Moldova -- Video of Vadul Rascov

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Simon Geissbuehler turned me on to the extremely evocative Jewish cemetery in Vadul Rascov, a rather remote village and former shtetl in Moldova.... I've never been there, but Simon loves the place and he and others who have made the trek have written about it and taken wonderful photos.

Simon sent the link to a TV video clip (in Romanian) about the place. What strikes me is not just the site itself but the relatively recent dates on the gravestones that are shown.

Shilin Food Court and Night Market (士林夜市) at Taipei, Taiwan

This was my second visit to the Shilin Night Market (N25.08591 E121.52440). Still the same procedure, having our dinner at the food court before the night market shopping. But the night was raining and we hope it will stop after our dinner...

Once we stepped into the food court, it was so crowded and difficult to find a table...after waiting for about 10 minutes, we found one 'mini table'! No choice, the only table around the food court...

The advantage of this Shilin Food Court is...there have all the famous street foods here! Plenty of choices...

All kind of Taiwanese foods available here in the food court



The famous Fried Chicken Chop of Shilin

Actually I wanted to try it, but changed my mind after look at the Looooong queue...then I decided to try my favorite Pork Belly pepper soup stall which I visited 4 years ago...

The pork belly soup stall

We ordered all different foods and that was the only way we can taste as many foods as possible...

The pork belly soup

The fried mee-hoon

The squids

The Oyster omelette

The stinky Tou-Fu

The Beef

Overall, I like the pork belly soup, beef and the squids. The rest were just average...

We took our sweet time for the dinner but the rain still heavy down poured even we finished our meals! We try to walked in the night market during the rain...but...the weather seems like against us!

So we decided to visit the night market again on the next day after our dinner. Below photos are taken on our next day visit to Shilin Night Market...

Ipad 2 was available at one of the stall during our visit! Wah!

Nice strawberries...


Nameless shop...

There were nothing much in the night market, I couldn't find anything to buy for my wife and daughter. And just for the sake of walking...because it was my friend's first visit.

Angel spotted in the night market!

The Bonnie Lass!

There was another Chicken Chop stall in the night market which was branches of the stall at the food court.

If you really want to do your shopping, you can walk around the night market for more than 4 hours or more, the night market is huge! But we were just wanted to explore the area...
After hanged around the area for about 1-2 hours then took a cab back to hotel for rest.

Related post :-
*  My Taiwan Trip on May, 2011

Location map of Shilin Night Market at Taipei, Taiwan


Thứ Hai, 25 tháng 7, 2011

Ukraine -- thoughtful report on the L'viv klez fest; virtually and non-virtually Jewish

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

My friend Sarah Zarrow is just wrapping up a stint of living and researching in L'viv. I have recommended her blog -- her most recent post is a thoughtful take and description -- with pictures -- of the L'viv Klez Fest, which I have never been to.
Perhaps because of demographic changes, sometimes festivals feel like a Jewish version of “add women and stir.” Take some hummus, some d minor, and some hava nagila…poof! Instant Jewish. Part of the festival is a street fair on Staroevreiska (the old Jewish street, in the oldest section of town). “Jewish” is sort of a stand-in, it seems, for old, antique, quaint. Laundry hangs from some cords, signs for LvivKlezFest hang on others.

I get fake Jewish stuff, some times. I don’t always find it pleasing, or even acceptable, but I don’t get offended; I often can see where it comes from, even if I don’t like it. And I admit a certain fondness for it, sometimes. Fiddler-esque kitsch has an appeal. What I don’t get is when Jews really buy into it. It’s like black people in blackface, and it’s not done (at least, it doesn’t look like it here) self-consciously, as burlesque….I got pretty grumpy, until I was knocked out of my snottiness by two people: Harald Binder, the President of the Board of the Center for Urban History, who made the excellent point that a vision of Jews as culture makers, party-throwers, and generally happy and friendly people would be better than the general view of Jews in L’viv now. And Zhenya reminded me that people were happy, and that happiness wasn’t a bad thing. Which I forget, even after being away from New York for two months.
The Festival seems to be quite theatrical, as attested by these clips from last year, showing a performance of a "Jewish Wedding" --


Chủ Nhật, 24 tháng 7, 2011

Poland -- visit to Dukla

Dukla's ruined synagogue, monotype by Shirley Moskowitz, 1993. (c) Estate of Shirley Moskowitz

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

One of Polish towns I visited in June was Dukla, a small town in the far south of the country at the top of the Dukla Pass just north of the border with Slovakia. Here, just off the rather run-down market square,  stand the gaping ruins of a once imposing synagogue.
Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

And there are  two Jewish cemeteries at the edge of town, marked from the road with a sign indicating it is a war memorial site.

Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

The walled newer cemetery, entered through a rusting gate, had a few neat rows of stones, some with fairly interesting carving -- and the whole area was nicely maintained, with freshly-cut grass/weeds.

Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Dulka. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Across the dirt road, though, the eroding gravestones in the old cemetery were scarcely visible in the thick vegetation.

Dukla. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

I first visited Dukla in, I believe, 1992, when I was researching my book "Upon the Doorposts of thy House: Jewish Life in East Central Europe, Yesterday and Today." (The book is out of print, but I am planning to re-issue it as an e-book on Kindle.) Things are much today as they were then, though the market square seemed a bit more run-down and less quaint this time around.

This is what I wrote about Dukla in "Doorposts":
The Dukla Pass is the lowest and easiest north-south route through the western Carpathians, and by the 16th century it was already a well-established artery for trade, including the wine trade. the town of Dukla itself prospered as a major center for the import of Hungarian wine, though Ber of Bolechow [the 18th century wine merchant and Jewish leader from what is now Bolekhiv in Ukraine] recounted that the Jewish wine traders from there were not always quite honest. He told the story of a certain Reb Hayyim of Dukla, who made a large purchase of wine in the Hungarian town of Miskolc at the same time that Ber's brother and two other associates were there. Unfortunately, Reb Hayyim paid the Hungarian suppliers with counterfeit money -- golden ducats that turned out to be gold-plated copper -- and Ber's brother and a friend were arrested along with Hayyim, even though it was acknowledged that they had not held any of the bad coins.

The three were kept in jail for a year, until, after much nerve-wracking investigation, the origin of the bad coins was traced to a monastery, which in turn had received them from local noblemen, who made a practice of circulating debased coinage at that time. Ber's brother was released from prison and was even paid a considerable sum in compensation for wrongful arrest, Ber wrote. But the affair had taken a toll: the stress and tension had caused Ber to break out in spots.

During World War II the Dukla Pass was the scene of bitterly fought battles between combined Czechoslovak and Soviet armies and the Germans. The bloody mountain fighting in the autumn of 1944 destroyed the German defenses and left 100,000 soldiers dead. The towns of Dukla, to the north of the pass, and Svidnik in Slovakia to the south, were almost totally razed. I passed numerous memorials to this fighting as I drove along the gentle curves through the wooded hills. Monuments had been erected to the fallen, and ruined tanks, artillery pieces, and airplanes had been left in place where they had been at the close of he conflict, rusting memorials to the battle.

Dukla itself was a small town clustered around a stage-set market square with a white market hall at its center. Nearby, I found the synagogue. It had been built around the middle of the 18th century, and the wily Reb Hayyim may will have worshipped there. Now it was a ruin. It had been destroyed during the wartime battles and had simply been left as it was, four massive stone walls and little else, looming in a small hollow. At the edge of town, a few graves still stood in the Jewish cemetery, surrounded by a brilliant carpet of wild spring flowers.
On that trip, I brought my mother, the artist Shirley Moskowitz, with me -- and she produced a cycle of montoype prints of some of the Jewish heritage sites we visited -- including the one of Dukla synagogue at the top of this post. The cycle of prints was exhibited in several places in Poland in the early 2000s, and now many of them are posted on the web site that we established for her and her artwork after her death in 2007.

Thứ Bảy, 23 tháng 7, 2011

Ukraine -- Struggle to recognize and recover Jewish heritage and history

Old Jewish Cemetery in L'viv -- now destroyed and built over by a market
By Ruth Ellen Gruber

The Kyiv Post has run a 5-part series over the past few weeks about the struggle of memory over Jewish heritage and history in Ukraine in the wake of the Holocaust.

One of the articles, which are by Natalia A. Feduschak, focuses on the valiant Meylakh Sheykhat and his tireless battles to preserve and honor Jewish heritage sites.
For nearly two decades, often working with limited resources, Sheykhet has tirelessly traveled throughout western Ukraine to ensure Jewish cultural remnants are preserved. It has not been an easy job for the 58-year-old, who has lived in Lviv nearly his entire life.

Not only is Sheykhet racing against time, neglect and the elements, he is also fighting apathy from some segments of the Ukrainian population, which does not always recognize Jewish culture as part of its own.


For instance, since 2003 he has been at loggerheads with local officials in Sambir, a town south of Lviv, to remove three large Christian crosses erected in the Jewish part of the cemetery. Visits by international figures like former Canadian-Ukrainian parliamentarian Borys Wrzesnewskyj and Mark Freiman, president of the Canadian Jewish Congress, have not changed local minds.


Before World War II, today’s western Ukraine boasted artifacts that reflected a culturally rich Jewish life. The landscape was dotted with cemeteries and synagogues, while towns and villages, often home to a population comprised largely of Jews, bore entire Jewish quarters with unique religious and residential structures.

Read a profile of Meylach HERE

Thứ Năm, 21 tháng 7, 2011

Grand Victoria Hotel (維多麗亞酒店) at Neihu, Taipei - Taiwan

Grand Victoria Hotel (維多麗亞酒店) (N25.08412 E121.55863) is located at corner of Jing Ye 4th Road of Neihu, Taipei. We check in to the hotel once we reached Taipei from Taichung.

Grand Victoria Hotel, Taipei

"The building is a fusion of classic Victorian architecture of the 19th century with contemporary elements of the 21st century."

I was attracted by the English-styled clock tower on the left of the building, it continue to change colour during night time...
We will stay here for 2 nights before we leave Taiwan. Too bad I don't have time to explore the hotel facility and others area.

The Lobby area of Grand Victoria Hotel

Once we settle at the front desk, we got to put all our luggage in the room and our driver was waiting to bring us to Shilin Night Market for our dinner.

Let me show you the room...

One King Bed

It was good enough for us to share the King bed...

The table in the room...

Some complimentary coffee and tea as usual...

But Suddenly we noticed the washroom was decorated with Glass! Which you can see through the washroom! OH! Man! We going to have problem! I will feel Very uneasy when another guy looking at me while showering?! Haha!

The view of the bathroom from the room

Nice bathtub, but I will not enjoy it if another guy is watching! Haha!

After 10-20 minutes searching, we finally found there was a switch beside the table...once 'Press', there were 2 vinyl curtain sliding down...OH! That solve the problem...!

The buttons below the table...(before that you can see the bed form the bathroom)

The curtain covered up the whole bathroom after pressed the button...

The view from the room...

After solved the 'bathroom' problem, I took some photos outside the hotel area...I like the clock tower very much...

Take note the colour of the clock tower...

We were satisfied with the friendly staffs here, hotel is Clean and smoking is Not allow in the hotel area. I noticed this was the Only hotel where every staffs be able to speak English. That was Great! The breakfast served on morning also good enough. It was a pleasant stay for us.

If you like know more about the Hotel, please click their official website below...

Grand Victoria Hotel
No. 168, Jing Ye 4th Road,
Taipei 104, Taiwan
Tel : +886-2-8502-0000   Fax : +886-2-8502-0005


Related post :-
*  My Taiwan Trip on May, 2011

Location map of Grand Victoria Hotel at Taipei, Taiwan


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