Sunday, April 15, 2012

Holocaust Miracle stories ;Alexander Ungar



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HOMEHolocaust Studies People Saved by a Prayer
One Jew's miraculous story.

by Sara Yoheved Rigler
A Holocaust survivor once told me, “Every Jew who survived the Holocaust survived by a miracle.” Alexander Unger survived by four miracles.

Alexander was born to an affluent, religious Jewish family in the village of Hidosholos in southwestern Hungary in 1906. He was married with three children by 1940, when he was drafted into the Hungarian army.

His father-in-law, fearing for his safety, insisted on taking Alexander to the Shimoni Rebbe, a Hassidic rebbe known for the efficacy of his blessings. The Rebbe blessed Alexander and told him that whenever his life was in danger he should recite a certain Biblical verse and add the words, “with the intention of the Maharal of Prague.”

Alexander protested. The 16th-century Maharal of Prague had been a great scholar and Kabbalist. According to legend, he had made the Golem, who had saved the Jews of Prague from a blood libel. How could Alexander presume to say anything with the lofty intention of the Maharal?

The Rebbe acknowledged that of course he could not duplicate the mystical intention of the Maharal, but nevertheless he must recite the words in Yiddish, “with the intention of the Maharal of Prague” at the end of the Biblical verse whenever his life was in danger.

Alexander’s first assignment in the army was at the Hungarian Secret Police Station. He considered it a plumb assignment because his aunt lived across the street from the station, and at lunch hour he could go and eat kosher food at her house. She gave him kosher sandwiches to supply him till the next day. Throughout the war, Alexander was able to keep kosher until he was deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp.

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In March, 1944, the Germans invaded Hungary. In April, Alexander was sent to a labor camp in Komaron. One day, on the seventh day of Passover, Alexander was ordered to join a group of 50 workers at the railroad station. The Nazis ordered them to load bales of hay and straw onto railroad cars to be shipped to the Russian front. The Hungarian authorities had always given ten-minute breaks every hour for the workers to smoke or use the toilet. The Germans, however, gave no breaks. After a while, the chain smokers started to smoke while loading the hay. Alexander warned them that the hay was highly flammable, but they ignored him.

The German guards accused the Jewish workers of sabotage.Suddenly the hay burst into flame and started a huge conflagration. Fortunately, there was a fire hydrant nearby. The workers passed buckets hand to hand, and managed to extinguish the blaze.

1949, Engagement photo Alexander Ungar and Elizabeth FriedThe German guards were irate. They accused the Hungarian Jewish workers of sabotage. They ordered the men to line up in ten rows of five and shouted that they would all be executed. The guards lifted their guns and aimed them at the hapless Jews. Alexander, in the last row, kept repeating the verse that the Shimoni Rebbe had instructed him.

The minutes dragged on, but the guards did not fire. Suddenly Alexander felt someone behind him strike him on the right shoulder. He turned around and saw the Captain of the Hungarian Secret Police, for whom he had worked earlier during the war. The Captain, who had liked Alexander because he was an intelligent and diligent worker, asked him what had happened. He explained that it was not sabotage; otherwise they would not have worked so hard to put out the fire. Rather, smokers could not keep from smoking, and a burning cigarette stub had accidentally ignited the straw. Alexander succeeded in convincing the Captain.

The execution was cancelled, and the men went back to work. “This was my first experience with that prayer,” Alexander recounted a half-century later.

The Bombs

Soon after, the American Air Force was heavily bombing that part of Hungary. Alexander’s work brigade was ordered to clear away the rubble after each air attack. Whenever the air raid siren sounded, the Hungarian officers allowed the Jewish slave laborers to run out of the camp and seek shelter. When the Germans took over, however, they forbid the Jews from fleeing the bombardments. The camp was next to a munitions factory, and 2,000 workers were killed during one bombing attack.

As Alexander later related:

When the Germans prohibited us from fleeing the bombs, I used what few resources I had to dig a little ditch. Whenever they sounded the siren, I took my tefillin and Book of Psalms that I had with me, and went into this little ditch. Of course, it didn’t protect me very much. If I was in the ditch and the explosion wasn’t too close, then I wasn’t harmed. But, since this kind of bomb made a tremendously large hole, like a funnel, if it hit anywhere near my ditch, there was no way to survive.

The bomb dropped right on the other side of the road, and killed both the German guard and seven of my friends.One day the siren went off and the airplanes flew overhead. I ran into the ditch, and started saying the verse. The bomb dropped right on the other side of the road, and killed both the German guard and seven of my friends.

Everyone in my labor brigade marveled at how I was not hurt. It was clearly a miracle. Soon after, another attack began. Everyone came running to me and jumped into the ditch with me. Even the dog ran to me for protection! It was unbelievable the way the dog behaved, as if he saw something. Maybe the dog saw the angel who was protecting me. Otherwise, why should the dog run to me in the ditch?

Potatoes for Passover

Afterwards, Alexander was deported to the infamous concentration camp of Buchenwald. He realized that his life depended on getting out of there by any means, so when the Germans started to assemble a transport of skilled workers, including auto mechanics, Alexander volunteered. The transport was sent to Tauchau, about seven kilometers from Leipzig, Germany. The factory in Tauchau manufactured the panzer faust, a hand grenade capable of blowing up a tank.

The tombstone of the Shimoni RavThe director of the labor camp announced that he needed someone to take care of the boiler, a highly technical job. This huge boiler had several tall chimneys and provided all the steam for the factory’s operation. Alexander stepped forward and declared that he was qualified to take care of the boiler. As proof, he claimed that he had received a diploma in engineering from Germany, and he cited the date and place where he had passed his exam. The director immediately went to the telephone and called the institute. He verified that Alexander was telling the truth and was certified to handle the boiler.

Part of Alexander’s job was to check the chimney pipes so that the soot that collected in the S-curves of the pipes would not block the flow of the smoke. One day when he was checking the pipes, he noticed a square crack on the wall of the room. It turned out to be a large cement block. He determined to check why this block was different than the others. With great exertion, he managed to remove the block. He saw that it opened to an adjoining room that was being used to store potatoes.

Alexander had smuggled a Jewish calendar into the camp, so he knew that the holiday of Passover was just a week away. He thrilled with excitement to realize that he didn’t have to stay alive by eating bread on Passover. Here was an unlimited supply of potatoes!

But how would he get the potatoes out without being caught? Alexander devised a plan, but he needed help, so he asked another Hungarian Jewish inmate named Klein to assist him. He explained his plan to Klein, who eagerly agreed, because, like all the other inmates, he lived on starvation rations and was always hungry.

Because there was no fire in the boiler on Sundays, the following Sunday Alexander sent a note to the camp director saying that he wanted to go into the factory to do some maintenance work. The director authorized him to go into the factory, but he sent an SS guard to keep an eye on him.

As Alexander later told the story:

The SS guard came and escorted us into the factory. Klein said to me, “How can we accomplish what we want? The SS is right here! He’s watching our every move!”

I said to him, “I have a special prayer that I say in times of danger. And if we have in our minds that on Pesach we will try not to eat chametz, because we will be able to live on the potatoes, then we will succeed.”

“But what will we do about the SS guard?” Klein protested.

I answered that we will say my special prayer, and take the risk, and God will help us to succeed.” So we said the prayer, and went with the SS guard to the factory.

When we arrived at the factory, I said to the SS guard, “You know our job is to remove the black soot from certain areas of the boiler. You are dressed in a nice clean uniform. You better get out of here, otherwise you are going to be so covered with soot that you will look like a chimney sweeper.” The guard was very pleased that I was so concerned about his appearance. When he left the room, we went to the room with the loose block and we removed the block. Klein climbed in through the opening and went down to the potato storage and started shoveling out potatoes.

Suddenly the SS guard returned and asked, “Where is the other fellow?”

I said, “Can’t you hear him shoveling the soot? Don’t come in here because in a moment I am going to open the bottom of this pipe and you’re going to be as black as a chimneysweeper. I’ve warned you.” At once, the SS guard ran away.

We immediately took a wheelbarrow that we usually used to remove trash, and placed it under the funnel, and opened up the bottom of an underground pipe that we had discovered, and the potatoes tumbled into the wheelbarrow. From there we took the wheelbarrow to another underground pipe and hid them there. We made two trips with the wheelbarrow, which was quite a lot of potatoes. We returned to the camp without the SS guard suspecting anything. On Pesach, we ate our potatoes.

Bright as Daylight

When the American army approached the area of the factory, the Nazis ordered the inmates to evacuate. They delivered a speech in which they said that this would not be a Death March. They assured the inmates that they had done an excellent job in the factory and would receive special treatment. “Of course,” Alexander later remarked, “we never believed a word the SS said.”

When it was time to evacuate, the Germans lined up the prisoners in rows of five across, in order to easily notice escapees. Accompanying every fifth row was an SS guard with an automatic rifle. The Commander announced that if anyone tried to escape, they would find him and kill him on the spot.

Alexander and his friend Klein started walking. Klein asked him, “How will we escape this one?”

Twenty-five years after the Holocaust Alexander went back to Hungary to visit the grave of his father and the grave of the Shimoni Rav. Here he is praying at his grave site.Alexander replied, “We will say the special prayer with real feeling, and God will help us.”

The march was accompanied by a wagon that carried some food and blankets. Fifteen prisoners — three rows of five — were needed to push this wagon. Every hour the shift of those pushing the wagon changed. Alexander noticed that while the guards were careful to count the prisoners in every marching row, they didn’t count the prisoners who pushed the wagon. And whenever they stopped to change the prisoners pushing the wagon, they allowed everyone to rest for ten minutes.

Although they were starved and exhausted, to their own amazement they ran with vigor.Around midnight on that dark, moonless night, it was Alexander’s and Klein’s turn to start pushing the wagon. They were resting in a ditch they had found. Alexander told Klein that they should lie down in the ditch and pretend to sleep. When the call came to start moving, they should remain in the ditch. If the Germans noticed that two men were missing and found them in the ditch, they could say they had fallen asleep. But Alexander assumed that the Germans would not notice so soon, and this would be their chance to escape.

They stayed in the ditch and kept reciting, over and over again, the special prayer. When they could no longer hear the sound of the men walking in the distance, they jumped up and started to run in the opposite direction. They took off their concentration camp uniforms, leaving on only their shirts, and ran. Although they were starved and exhausted, to their own amazement they ran with vigor.

Whenever they heard a vehicle approaching, they jumped off the highway and hid on the side of the road. After a while a car approached with such weak headlights that they barely had time to jump off the road into the embankment. The car stopped directly above them. Afraid that the occupants of the car had seen them and that they were about to be killed, Alexander fervently recited his special verse.

An SS captain and sergeant got out of the car. The sergeant said to the captain, “It’s impossible for the prisoners to have come this far, because they were tired and they would have had to run fast to cover this much distance. We must have passed them. They must be behind us somewhere.”

The captain replied, “Anyway, it’s so dark we can’t see a thing. We have some flares. Let’s shoot up some flares and make sure that as long as we’ve stopped here, that they’re not here.”

It was as bright as daylight. The SS men looked straight at us and said, “It looks like they’re not here.”The sergeant took the flares out of the car and shot them off right above the two escapees. As Alexander related:

It was as bright as daylight. I was saying the verse with all my might. The SS men looked straight at us and said, “It looks like they’re not here.” We had become invisible to them! The captain said, “All right, let’s go back to the car. Probably we passed them.”

Alexander Unger survived the war. His wife and three children perished. He immigrated to the United States in May, 1947, settling in Queens, New York. There he married and had two daughters and three grandchildren. He lived to the age of 92.

November 1997, 90th birthday party, attended by most of the Ungar clan.Judaism is not Harry Potter, and the verse was not a magical incantation. I do not presume to understand how the blessing of a holy person, carried on the recitation of certain words, could save a life. Nor do I understand why Alexander Unger was saved while millions of others were not. But one thing is clear: Despite having lost almost his entire family in the Holocaust, Alexander Unger remained a devout, believing Jew.

He concluded his unpublished memoirs with these words:

When my daughter Oriana asks me how I can believe in God after the Holocaust, I answer, “How can I NOT believe in God after all the miracles I experienced?”
For Sara Yoheved Rigler’s Spring Tour schedule or to order her new book God Winked, visit her website, www.sararigler.com.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
HOMEHolocaust Studies People Saved by a Prayer
One Jew's miraculous story.

by Sara Yoheved Rigler
A Holocaust survivor once told me, “Every Jew who survived the Holocaust survived by a miracle.” Alexander Unger survived by four miracles.

Alexander was born to an affluent, religious Jewish family in the village of Hidosholos in southwestern Hungary in 1906. He was married with three children by 1940, when he was drafted into the Hungarian army.

His father-in-law, fearing for his safety, insisted on taking Alexander to the Shimoni Rebbe, a Hassidic rebbe known for the efficacy of his blessings. The Rebbe blessed Alexander and told him that whenever his life was in danger he should recite a certain Biblical verse and add the words, “with the intention of the Maharal of Prague.”

Alexander protested. The 16th-century Maharal of Prague had been a great scholar and Kabbalist. According to legend, he had made the Golem, who had saved the Jews of Prague from a blood libel. How could Alexander presume to say anything with the lofty intention of the Maharal?

The Rebbe acknowledged that of course he could not duplicate the mystical intention of the Maharal, but nevertheless he must recite the words in Yiddish, “with the intention of the Maharal of Prague” at the end of the Biblical verse whenever his life was in danger.

Alexander’s first assignment in the army was at the Hungarian Secret Police Station. He considered it a plumb assignment because his aunt lived across the street from the station, and at lunch hour he could go and eat kosher food at her house. She gave him kosher sandwiches to supply him till the next day. Throughout the war, Alexander was able to keep kosher until he was deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Click here to receive Aish.com's free weekly email.

In March, 1944, the Germans invaded Hungary. In April, Alexander was sent to a labor camp in Komaron. One day, on the seventh day of Passover, Alexander was ordered to join a group of 50 workers at the railroad station. The Nazis ordered them to load bales of hay and straw onto railroad cars to be shipped to the Russian front. The Hungarian authorities had always given ten-minute breaks every hour for the workers to smoke or use the toilet. The Germans, however, gave no breaks. After a while, the chain smokers started to smoke while loading the hay. Alexander warned them that the hay was highly flammable, but they ignored him.

The German guards accused the Jewish workers of sabotage.Suddenly the hay burst into flame and started a huge conflagration. Fortunately, there was a fire hydrant nearby. The workers passed buckets hand to hand, and managed to extinguish the blaze.

1949, Engagement photo Alexander Ungar and Elizabeth FriedThe German guards were irate. They accused the Hungarian Jewish workers of sabotage. They ordered the men to line up in ten rows of five and shouted that they would all be executed. The guards lifted their guns and aimed them at the hapless Jews. Alexander, in the last row, kept repeating the verse that the Shimoni Rebbe had instructed him.

The minutes dragged on, but the guards did not fire. Suddenly Alexander felt someone behind him strike him on the right shoulder. He turned around and saw the Captain of the Hungarian Secret Police, for whom he had worked earlier during the war. The Captain, who had liked Alexander because he was an intelligent and diligent worker, asked him what had happened. He explained that it was not sabotage; otherwise they would not have worked so hard to put out the fire. Rather, smokers could not keep from smoking, and a burning cigarette stub had accidentally ignited the straw. Alexander succeeded in convincing the Captain.

The execution was cancelled, and the men went back to work. “This was my first experience with that prayer,” Alexander recounted a half-century later.

The Bombs

Soon after, the American Air Force was heavily bombing that part of Hungary. Alexander’s work brigade was ordered to clear away the rubble after each air attack. Whenever the air raid siren sounded, the Hungarian officers allowed the Jewish slave laborers to run out of the camp and seek shelter. When the Germans took over, however, they forbid the Jews from fleeing the bombardments. The camp was next to a munitions factory, and 2,000 workers were killed during one bombing attack.

As Alexander later related:

When the Germans prohibited us from fleeing the bombs, I used what few resources I had to dig a little ditch. Whenever they sounded the siren, I took my tefillin and Book of Psalms that I had with me, and went into this little ditch. Of course, it didn’t protect me very much. If I was in the ditch and the explosion wasn’t too close, then I wasn’t harmed. But, since this kind of bomb made a tremendously large hole, like a funnel, if it hit anywhere near my ditch, there was no way to survive.

The bomb dropped right on the other side of the road, and killed both the German guard and seven of my friends.One day the siren went off and the airplanes flew overhead. I ran into the ditch, and started saying the verse. The bomb dropped right on the other side of the road, and killed both the German guard and seven of my friends.

Everyone in my labor brigade marveled at how I was not hurt. It was clearly a miracle. Soon after, another attack began. Everyone came running to me and jumped into the ditch with me. Even the dog ran to me for protection! It was unbelievable the way the dog behaved, as if he saw something. Maybe the dog saw the angel who was protecting me. Otherwise, why should the dog run to me in the ditch?

Potatoes for Passover

Afterwards, Alexander was deported to the infamous concentration camp of Buchenwald. He realized that his life depended on getting out of there by any means, so when the Germans started to assemble a transport of skilled workers, including auto mechanics, Alexander volunteered. The transport was sent to Tauchau, about seven kilometers from Leipzig, Germany. The factory in Tauchau manufactured the panzer faust, a hand grenade capable of blowing up a tank.

The tombstone of the Shimoni RavThe director of the labor camp announced that he needed someone to take care of the boiler, a highly technical job. This huge boiler had several tall chimneys and provided all the steam for the factory’s operation. Alexander stepped forward and declared that he was qualified to take care of the boiler. As proof, he claimed that he had received a diploma in engineering from Germany, and he cited the date and place where he had passed his exam. The director immediately went to the telephone and called the institute. He verified that Alexander was telling the truth and was certified to handle the boiler.

Part of Alexander’s job was to check the chimney pipes so that the soot that collected in the S-curves of the pipes would not block the flow of the smoke. One day when he was checking the pipes, he noticed a square crack on the wall of the room. It turned out to be a large cement block. He determined to check why this block was different than the others. With great exertion, he managed to remove the block. He saw that it opened to an adjoining room that was being used to store potatoes.

Alexander had smuggled a Jewish calendar into the camp, so he knew that the holiday of Passover was just a week away. He thrilled with excitement to realize that he didn’t have to stay alive by eating bread on Passover. Here was an unlimited supply of potatoes!

But how would he get the potatoes out without being caught? Alexander devised a plan, but he needed help, so he asked another Hungarian Jewish inmate named Klein to assist him. He explained his plan to Klein, who eagerly agreed, because, like all the other inmates, he lived on starvation rations and was always hungry.

Because there was no fire in the boiler on Sundays, the following Sunday Alexander sent a note to the camp director saying that he wanted to go into the factory to do some maintenance work. The director authorized him to go into the factory, but he sent an SS guard to keep an eye on him.

As Alexander later told the story:

The SS guard came and escorted us into the factory. Klein said to me, “How can we accomplish what we want? The SS is right here! He’s watching our every move!”

I said to him, “I have a special prayer that I say in times of danger. And if we have in our minds that on Pesach we will try not to eat chametz, because we will be able to live on the potatoes, then we will succeed.”

“But what will we do about the SS guard?” Klein protested.

I answered that we will say my special prayer, and take the risk, and God will help us to succeed.” So we said the prayer, and went with the SS guard to the factory.

When we arrived at the factory, I said to the SS guard, “You know our job is to remove the black soot from certain areas of the boiler. You are dressed in a nice clean uniform. You better get out of here, otherwise you are going to be so covered with soot that you will look like a chimney sweeper.” The guard was very pleased that I was so concerned about his appearance. When he left the room, we went to the room with the loose block and we removed the block. Klein climbed in through the opening and went down to the potato storage and started shoveling out potatoes.

Suddenly the SS guard returned and asked, “Where is the other fellow?”

I said, “Can’t you hear him shoveling the soot? Don’t come in here because in a moment I am going to open the bottom of this pipe and you’re going to be as black as a chimneysweeper. I’ve warned you.” At once, the SS guard ran away.

We immediately took a wheelbarrow that we usually used to remove trash, and placed it under the funnel, and opened up the bottom of an underground pipe that we had discovered, and the potatoes tumbled into the wheelbarrow. From there we took the wheelbarrow to another underground pipe and hid them there. We made two trips with the wheelbarrow, which was quite a lot of potatoes. We returned to the camp without the SS guard suspecting anything. On Pesach, we ate our potatoes.

Bright as Daylight

When the American army approached the area of the factory, the Nazis ordered the inmates to evacuate. They delivered a speech in which they said that this would not be a Death March. They assured the inmates that they had done an excellent job in the factory and would receive special treatment. “Of course,” Alexander later remarked, “we never believed a word the SS said.”

When it was time to evacuate, the Germans lined up the prisoners in rows of five across, in order to easily notice escapees. Accompanying every fifth row was an SS guard with an automatic rifle. The Commander announced that if anyone tried to escape, they would find him and kill him on the spot.

Alexander and his friend Klein started walking. Klein asked him, “How will we escape this one?”

Twenty-five years after the Holocaust Alexander went back to Hungary to visit the grave of his father and the grave of the Shimoni Rav. Here he is praying at his grave site.Alexander replied, “We will say the special prayer with real feeling, and God will help us.”

The march was accompanied by a wagon that carried some food and blankets. Fifteen prisoners — three rows of five — were needed to push this wagon. Every hour the shift of those pushing the wagon changed. Alexander noticed that while the guards were careful to count the prisoners in every marching row, they didn’t count the prisoners who pushed the wagon. And whenever they stopped to change the prisoners pushing the wagon, they allowed everyone to rest for ten minutes.

Although they were starved and exhausted, to their own amazement they ran with vigor.Around midnight on that dark, moonless night, it was Alexander’s and Klein’s turn to start pushing the wagon. They were resting in a ditch they had found. Alexander told Klein that they should lie down in the ditch and pretend to sleep. When the call came to start moving, they should remain in the ditch. If the Germans noticed that two men were missing and found them in the ditch, they could say they had fallen asleep. But Alexander assumed that the Germans would not notice so soon, and this would be their chance to escape.

They stayed in the ditch and kept reciting, over and over again, the special prayer. When they could no longer hear the sound of the men walking in the distance, they jumped up and started to run in the opposite direction. They took off their concentration camp uniforms, leaving on only their shirts, and ran. Although they were starved and exhausted, to their own amazement they ran with vigor.

Whenever they heard a vehicle approaching, they jumped off the highway and hid on the side of the road. After a while a car approached with such weak headlights that they barely had time to jump off the road into the embankment. The car stopped directly above them. Afraid that the occupants of the car had seen them and that they were about to be killed, Alexander fervently recited his special verse.

An SS captain and sergeant got out of the car. The sergeant said to the captain, “It’s impossible for the prisoners to have come this far, because they were tired and they would have had to run fast to cover this much distance. We must have passed them. They must be behind us somewhere.”

The captain replied, “Anyway, it’s so dark we can’t see a thing. We have some flares. Let’s shoot up some flares and make sure that as long as we’ve stopped here, that they’re not here.”

It was as bright as daylight. The SS men looked straight at us and said, “It looks like they’re not here.”The sergeant took the flares out of the car and shot them off right above the two escapees. As Alexander related:

It was as bright as daylight. I was saying the verse with all my might. The SS men looked straight at us and said, “It looks like they’re not here.” We had become invisible to them! The captain said, “All right, let’s go back to the car. Probably we passed them.”

Alexander Unger survived the war. His wife and three children perished. He immigrated to the United States in May, 1947, settling in Queens, New York. There he married and had two daughters and three grandchildren. He lived to the age of 92.

November 1997, 90th birthday party, attended by most of the Ungar clan.Judaism is not Harry Potter, and the verse was not a magical incantation. I do not presume to understand how the blessing of a holy person, carried on the recitation of certain words, could save a life. Nor do I understand why Alexander Unger was saved while millions of others were not. But one thing is clear: Despite having lost almost his entire family in the Holocaust, Alexander Unger remained a devout, believing Jew.

He concluded his unpublished memoirs with these words:

When my daughter Oriana asks me how I can believe in God after the Holocaust, I answer, “How can I NOT believe in God after all the miracles I experienced?”
For Sara Yoheved Rigler’s Spring Tour schedule or to order her new book God Winked, visit her website, www.sararigler.com.

__________________________________________________________________________________
Dorit Korenblum grew up thinking she would never know much about her father's family, most of whom perished during the Holocaust. The only known surviving relic was one photo of his mother – Dorit’s grandmother – taken in Warsaw before the war.

When Dorit visited her aunt Chela-Chinka in Paris in the early 1980’s, she was amazed to discover dozens of perfectly preserved photos of the Korenblum family. When the Nazi’s invaded Poland, Chinka, as she was called, escaped to Russia with her two brothers, taking the valuable photos with her for fear she would never see her family again. Dorit was particularly fascinated by one specific photo of her grandparents and their children, including her father Yaakov with his siblings.

Yaakov was the youngest of five children born to Tuvia and Bracha Korenblum in Warsaw. During the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, Yaakov escaped to Russia with his older brother Nachum and his sister, Chele-Chinka. The rest of the family perished at the hands of the Nazis, with the exception of another sister Sarah Leah who was living in Paris before the War.

“I knew that photo of my grandparents and their children would play an important part in our family's future,” Dorit recalls. “Although I had no idea how.” She insisted that her aunt let her keep the photo, though only several decades later would its significance be understood.
Runaway Brothers

Tuvia Korenblum was a successful bookbinder in pre-war Warsaw, known far and wide for his golden hands. Bracha Korenblum was pregnant with her first son, Nachum, during World War I. Due to malnutrition caused by poor war rations he was born disabled, unable to walk. At the age of seven he was finally sent for treatments and was healed. From that day on, however, Nachum refused to walk—instead he preferred to run everywhere he went. He quickly became a leader and his younger brother Yaakov became his trusty follower. The two were inseparable. "The degree of love in their family was much stronger than anything we find today," says Dorit.

Germans guards tried to convince them to return to Poland.When the Nazis invaded Poland, the two youngest Korenblum children, Yaakov and his sister Chele-Chinka, followed their older brother Nachum across the border into Russia. The Germans tried hard to convince escaped Jews to return to Poland by distributing brochures at the border checkpoints, insisting that they didn't intend the Jews any harm. Many Jews succumbed to these empty promises, believing falsely that the Russian winter was a much greater enemy than the Nazis.

The three Korenblum siblings stood at the crossing, unsure what to do. On one hand, they had been forced to leave their parents behind, who were too old to flee home. On the other hand, the stories of Nazi cruelty during the early days of Hitler's rise to power had already reached their ears. The Korenblums decided to watch the Nazi soldiers who were stationed at the border to see what they were all about. After a while they concluded that returning to Poland was suicide.

"I wasn't about to put myself into their hands," Yaakov recounted years later. "The Russians may have been violent at times, but the Germans were extremely cruel. We weren't going back." Nonetheless, Chele-Chinka returned to Warsaw one more time to attempt to convince their parents to follow them into Russia, to no avail.

Brothers at Arms

In Russia, Chele-Chinka was adopted by a poor Kazaki family who cared for her in return for housework. The two brothers decided that the best way to survive as refugee orphans was to join the Red Army. The two were stationed in Outer Mongolia, to thwart the Japanese expansion into Mongolia and lower Siberia. For five long years during the war, they never left each other’s side. Suddenly in 1944, just as the war was ending, Yaakov and Nachum were recruited into different units and they completely lost all contact with each other. They never found each other again.

After the war, both brothers – unbeknownst of each other – made their way back to Poland in search of surviving relatives. Neither reached his destination, however. Yaakov's money was stolen by a fellow soldier in Stanislavov, Ukraine, and he was unable to continue his journey. He ended up staying in Stanislavov, where he married and stayed for over a decade.

Nacham, on the other hand, was lacking certain papers and was unable to go further west than Kiev. That’s where he stayed and got married. For years the two brothers searched painfully for each other, but the Red Cross in Russia – either uninformed or uninterested in helping survivors – provided no answers.

In 1957, Yaakov managed to get exit visas to Israel for himself, his wife, and two children. They left the Soviet Union via Poland. Only once they had entered Poland were they able to track down their two surviving sisters and reunite, Chela-Chinka who had immigrated to Paris, and Sarah Leah who fled from the Nazi invasion of France to Morocco.

Unfortunately, they were never able to track down Nachum, who was still living on the other side of the Iron Curtain. They mourned the loss of their brother all their lives – certain that he was still alive somewhere. Shortly before Chele-Chinka passed away in 2006, she held Dorit's hand and said, "look for Nachum, look for Nachum."However, even after the fall of communism, the searches were always in vain, due largely to the fact that Nachum’s last name was changed to Koramblyum in the Ukraine.

Nachum remained separated from the rest of the surviving family members for the rest of his life. “He didn’t have any family,” Nachum’s oldest son Anatoly said. “He searched all his life for them and was very disappointed to never find them.”

Yaakov and his family eventually settled in Haifa. Dorit, their third child, was born there a few years later.

The lost brother, Nachum, remained in Kiev, also raising three children. His family relocated to the United States in 1991, after the fall of communism. Both Yaakov and Nachum continued the family business of bookbinding, over a thousand miles away from each other – Yaakov in Haifa, and Nachum in Kiev. They were both famous for their golden hands, just like their father

A Living Testament

In 1958, shortly after Yaakov moved to Israel, he entered a “Page of Testimony” for his deceased parents in Yad Vashem's Database of Victims' Names. In 2004 this database of over 4 million names went online. In 2006, Dorit's older sister, Bracha, decided to update details on her grandfather's Page of Testimony. She uploaded a copy of the family photograph that Dorit had taken from their Aunt Chele-Chinka in Paris two decades earlier – a photo that included the inseparable young brothers, Yaakov and Nachum.

Five years later, in the fall of 2011, Nachum's grandson, Igor Korenblum of New York, conducted a search on the Yad Vashem database and found the Page of Testimony submitted for his great-grandfather Tuvia Korenblum. Until this point, the descendents of “lost brother Nachum” never had any connection with the rest of the family tree.

They were suspicious of an email from a “long-lost cousin.”When Anatoly saw the photographs, he was shocked to see that one of Tuvia's children bore a striking resemblance to the photos he had seen of his father Nachum as a young man. Only then did he realize that the post must have been made by his very own cousins. "I couldn't sleep for a week, it was so exciting,” he recalls. “This was the first time I had seen the faces of my father's family. My father would mention that I looked like his younger brother Yaakov – and now I saw it was true!"

When Dorit and Bracha received an email from Anatoly claiming to be their long-lost cousin, they were suspicious. "It's a good Jewish quality," Dorit said. "We have to be suspicious to survive in a world that sought to destroy our ancestors. We asked for proof."

Anatoly responded by sending a photo of his father before the war and another of his aunt Sarah Leah and her husband in Paris.

"This is him!" Dorit exclaimed. "I couldn't believe it."

"Since I was a little boy, I remember my father telling me that he had a brother," Nachum's son Gennadiy recalls. "'He is somewhere,' he used to say.’I always held him in my hands. I never let anyone separate us.'"

Gennadiy's oldest son Yvgeny received a bris at age 13 when they arrived in America. At the bris he was given the Hebrew name Yaakov, after his grandfather's "lost" brother.

Coming Full Circle

Nachum died in 1996. Yaakov died five years later in 2001. Now, more than a decade later, their children were united at Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial. Amazingly, their first contact by email took place on the yartzeit memorial of Yaakov’s death. "We are happy to find our cousins, but we are sad that our fathers never had a chance to find each other in their lifetimes," Anatoly said. "Maybe our fathers in heaven made it possible for us to find each other this day."

The new cousins continue to stay in touch regularly and are planning more transcontinental trips to spend time catching up with each other.

"I am sure our fathers are happy now upstairs seeing us all here together," Gennadiy says. "This means everything to me."

"A circle has been closed,” said Yaakov's only son Rafael Korenblum. “There was something unresolved all these years. It lingered, and now there is closure."

Cynthia Wroclawski, the manager of Yad Vashem's name recovery project, explained that similar breakthroughs happen on a regular basis. Increased discoveries are being made more and more nowadays, thanks to the internet, as well as to greater openness among aging survivors to tell their stories and the curiosity of their tech-savvy descendents.

"The lock is being opened by the younger generation,” she says. “They have more intuition and more interest. That's the power of the database. The torch of memory is being passed."

Efforts are continuing to collect names – primarily in Eastern Europe – where Jews were often rounded up, shot and dumped into mass graves without any documentation. On the other hand, the names of Jews killed at German death camps are recorded in the meticulous Nazi records.

Yad Vashem encourages survivors and their descendents to fill out pages of testimony for those killed, before their names and stories are lost forever.

"There is still much more to do," Wroclawski said. "For these families, the rift of the Holocaust is getting smaller. Some kind of healing is taking place."
____________________________________________________________________________________
http://www.aish.com/ho/p/97788879.html?s=g
A tribute to 10 brave Jewish women who stood up to the Nazis.
Greater than Angels: Interview with Pearl Benisch
by Daisy Benchimol

There is an old Polish legend about a dragon named Smok who was in the habit of roaming the streets of Krakow in search of young maidens to eat, while spreading terror and destroying everything in its path. In her stirring Holocaust memoir, To Vanquish the Dragon, Pearl Benisch describes the encounter of the Jewish community of Poland with the Nazi dragon of the 20th Century; and the victory of the maidens who dared to fight the beast.

Mrs. Benisch, who was born and raised in Krakow, describes the extraordinary faith and self-sacrifice shown by her family and other members of her Jewish community during the Holocaust. Her memoir is a rare tribute to the heroism of some of the victims themselves, including the unimaginable courage and strength shown by a group of ten female friends, nicknamed the Zehnerschaft, who supported each other through the tortures of the ghettos, deportations and death camps

The Zehnerschaft was made up of young women between the ages of 16 and 26, including Mrs. Benisch herself, who were all colleagues and teachers from Beth Yaakov schools for girls in Krakow and surrounding areas. Mrs. Benisch gives detailed accounts of the inspiring way these brave women repeatedly risked their lives to help others and uphold their commitment to Torah and Jewish observance. Armed with the Jewish values and ideals that had been transmitted to them, they managed to become models of courage and altruism even in the bowels of hell.

In Man’s Search for Meaning Viktor Frankl observed that “…most men in a concentration camp believed the real opportunities of life had passed. Yet, in reality, there was an opportunity and a challenge. One could make a victory of those experiences turning life into an inner triumph…” The women of the Zehnerschaft became living proof that the type of spiritual victory Frankl was describing is possible in the nightmare of the death camps

During a recent interview at her home in Brooklyn, Mrs. Benisch spoke about her friends in the Zehnerschaft and some of the lessons she learned from her experiences in the Holocaust.

Can you give an example of the courage shown by the women of the Zehnershaft?

At Plashow one of our jobs was to clean the kitchen. So sometimes we managed to get hold of a little bit of flour. We would mix it with water and bake matza biscuits on top of the stove. We were not permitted to go into the men’s camp but we had to deliver the biscuits to the men who were working in what was called the “library.” There were many important rabbis in the camp and some of them had been assigned to sorting books and manuscripts; believe it or not the Germans wanted to have the Hebrew books. So late at night we would sneak down to bring them those biscuits and sometimes a few turnips, a piece of bread, or whatever we could get our hands on. It was a dangerous trip because we had to sneak past the trigger-happy soldiers in the watchtower. Every day another girl would risk her life to bring them this food so they wouldn’t starve to death.

The monster ran from barrack to barrack looking for us, but miraculously, he didn’t find us. One night we were spotted by Willie who was the most dreaded SS man in the camp, known for his habit of gouging out his victim’s eyes. We ran in terror. We were past caring about being shot – we just didn’t want him to catch us alive. He chased after us but, thank God, we managed to lose him. We reached our barrack and jumped into our bunks. The monster didn’t give up. He ran from barrack to barrack looking for us, but miraculously, he didn’t find us.

What do you think made you and your friends in the Zehnerschaft act with so much courage?

I will tell you a story. We arrived in Auschwitz and they took us to a crematorium with brown wooden doors on which was written the word sauna (shower). It was Friday afternoon and we had just come from Plashow. There were 2,000 girls and we all knew what was coming. There was an electric fence and some of the girls went over to the fence. They said, “Why should we wait to go to the gas chambers? Let’s end it all now.” So I said to them, “The Torah tells us, 'u’bacharta b’chaim' – choose life [Deut. 30:19]. Girls, we have to choose life! No matter what life will do to us, we have to choose life.” And that’s what we did – we chose life. We waited for those doors to open. They never opened for us – we don’t know why. In the morning, Saturday, they marched us to the women’s camp.

In your book you describe many extraordinary incidents involving your friend Rivkah Horowitz who was with you through most of the war. Can you tell me a bit about her?

There has never been a hero like Rivkah Horowitz-Pinkusewitz. She was a teacher and a leader in Beth Yaakov. She was smart and brave. One day in Plashow we were sewing uniforms for the Germans. Next to my sewing machine was Erma’s machine. Erma was depressed and we were trying to cheer her up. Suddenly the door opened and in walked the dreaded Oberscharfuhrer John with two SS men. We all stood at attention, but Erma just sat there; she wasn’t all there any more. So I tried to alert her with a kick. Snap out of it Erma I prayed, but she didn’t get up.

There must have been a thousand women there but he noticed her right away. He walked straight up to her and pointed his gun at her temple – we were all familiar with the joy he found in shooting people. All of a sudden, Rivkah, who was sitting next to us, gets up quickly and faces him and says, “Herr Oberscharfuhrer, this is not her fault, she is meshuge.” She couldn’t remember the German word for crazy so she said meshuge. Now he didn’t know the meaning of meshuge but he couldn’t get over the fact that a girl had the guts to talk to him and to ask him not to shoot her friend. But he didn’t shoot her. He put his gun back and walked away. That was Rivkah.

You also write about the time Rivkah Horowitz tried to save your life during one of the selections at Birkenau. What stands out for you about that incident?

I was dressed already but they gave me a big jacket of a man’s suit and I must have looked terrible because when I came to Hoess, he pointed to the left which meant death – the crematorium. Rivkah was sent to the right, but she snuck around to the left to join me. I begged her to go back but she refused. “I won’t leave you,” she said. “I’m not giving up. We have to keep fighting.”

After us came Ruchka Schanzer: right. Then Sarah Blaugrund: left. Ruchka ran after Sarah to the left. The rest of our Zehnerschaft passed safely, but the four of us were on the left. Then Rivkah took us back to the middle of the line. I was afraid that Hoess would recognize us but Rivkah didn’t care. When we reached Hoess again the same thing happened: he sent Sarah and me to the left and Rivkah and Ruchka to the right. But the two of them followed us again to the left.

I screamed in frustration, “Why follow us to death?! It’s not just your life you’re forfeiting, but also the lives of future generations. You have no right to do it. Go back to the other side where you belong!” Sarah and I shouted, cried and pleaded with them, but they had made up their minds. Rivkah dragged us to the back of the line but when we reached Hoess the third time, the same scenario repeated itself and, once more, Rivkah and Ruchka followed us. By now the selection was over. The girls who had been chosen to live were taken out of the barrack and the four of us stayed behind in the death block with all the other condemned women.

What happened after that?

That same evening…it was Shabbos…someone knocked on the door of our barrack. The Blockalteste opened it and in walked our friend Tillie Rinder, known by all as the White Angel of Auschwitz, and Toni Katz, another angel. They said to us: “Girls, hurry up. Follow us and stay in the shadows. May God watch over us.” The Blockalteste opened the door and allowed us to step out with our rescuers. We followed them, hugging the walls to avoid the floodlights. Then we had to cross the vast Appelplatz which was flooded with light from all the watchtowers. The watchmen had orders to shoot anyone who was seen walking there.

We had to cross the vast Appelplatz which was flooded with light. The watchmen had orders to shoot anyone seen walking there. We were terrified – not for ourselves anymore since we were doomed anyway, but for our rescuers. I prayed for their lives. Thank God we made it across and stood in front of the barracks of the living. Nobody said a word. Everything had been prearranged. The Blockalteste assigned us to our bunks, and we were joyfully reunited with the other girls of our Zehnerschaft.

You write about the heroism of Tzila Orlean who was a teacher at Beth Yaakov before the war and who “constantly walked the tightrope between life and death” in order to help others. What stands out most in your mind about Tzila?

I don’t even know where to begin talking about Tzila. If I had the strength left I would write a book about her. In Auschwitz, the Germans called her “Orlean” – Tzila was the only inmate called by name. Everyone who knew her respected her. One Friday she lit the Shabbos candle and said the blessing. All the women in the barrack were watching her, and this gave them hope and the will to continue living. They were all standing there and suddenly they heard the footsteps of an SS guard nearing the barrack. Everyone panicked. “Tzila, Tzila! Put out the candle!”

And Tzila said calmly, “This is my Shabbos candle, I wouldn’t dream of blowing it out.”

Everybody ran out of the barrack. He came in and looked at her and then at the candle. She kept looking at her candle. He stood there looking and then he left.

Can you talk about the time Tzila saved the 20 women who had been selected by Mengele?

When we arrived in Auschwitz there were 2,000 of us but Mengele selected 20 women, including my Aunt Sabina, and they were taken away. I asked Tzila if she could help them. “If Mengele selected them, they’re doomed,” she said. “But if he put them in block 25 there might still be a chance for a miracle. Let’s pray and hope.”

The next day Tzila looked out the window of the infirmary where she was working and saw Dr. Klein, the German doctor in charge of block 25. She ran out and said to him, “Yesterday they took a couple of my nurses to block 25 by mistake. Please give me written permission to take them out.”

“I’m new here," he said. "Please leave me alone.”

I can’t imagine how, in the bowels of Auschwitz, Tzila had the guts to do that. Tzila kept insisting but he refused. On the way back to the infirmary she ran into SS Aufseherin, the head doctor. Tzila said to her, “I just spoke to Dr. Klein and asked him to release a few of my nurses who were taken to Block 25 by mistake. Could you please arrange for their release?"

“Yes, I saw you speaking to him just now," the doctor said to her. "Go to my secretary Bronka and give her the names of the women.” So Tzila went to Bronka and gave her the names of all 20 women. Miraculously, they were all released and brought back to our barrack! When I think about it now, I can’t imagine how, in the bowels of Auschwitz, Tzila had the guts to do that.

Can you talk about how you and Rivkah Horowitz managed to get your friend Balka Grossfeld out of prison?

There was a Gestapo chief named Handke who had become the terror of Krakow. He would drag Jewish men from their homes and arrest them for no reason. Anyone who tried to intervene on their behalf was considered an accomplice and arrested. One day Handke’s thugs stormed into the home of my friend Balka Grossfeld looking for her father. He was not at home so they took Balka instead and put her in prison where she was interrogated. She was there for several months and even her uncle, who was very influential, couldn’t get her out. It got to the point where we couldn’t stand it any more, so Rivkah and I decided to try to get her out by going to speak to Handke ourselves.

One morning we went to the Gestapo building. Once there we saw a sign: “Entry Forbidden to Jews and Dogs.” We entered anyway and the angry guard shouted, “Jews! You don’t see this sign?”

“Yes we see it," I replied, "but Handke needs the information that we’re bringing him.” I don’t know why I said it; God put those words in my mouth. They were always looking for information on people, so this was a good reason to let us in.

They took us to Handke’s office and the secretary took our names then put us in a big safe and locked the door. It was so dark in there and we didn't know what was going to happen. Was she going to take us to Handke or were they going to take us to prison together with Balka?

We waited and waited and finally the steel door opened and they took us to Handke. Rivkah didn’t speak German so I had to address him, but how should I address him? Oberscharfuhrer? Maybe he’s Unterscharfuhrer. But if I call him Unterscharfuhrer and he’s Oberscharfuhrer he might get angry. So I said “Herr Doctor.” That got him. I don’t know what made me say it but he liked the title. He told us to sit down, which was very unusual, and asked me why we’ve come. I began to speak about Balka and he said, “She’s stubborn and refuses to tell me where her father is.”

Once again God put words in my mouth and I made up a story. “She doesn’t know where he is and doesn’t want to know," I told him. "Her father is a drunk. He never comes home. She supports her family with her sewing. She’s so innocent. Please let her go home." Then he asked us a few more questions and told us to go home. Two weeks later Balka was back at the ghetto.

What motivated you and your friends of the Zehnerschaft to act in such a self- sacrificing way at the risk of torture and death?

This is the upbringing and education we had. We were taught to help people no matter what price we had to pay for it. We are here to give. We live to give. As long as you give, you live. You stop giving, you stop living; you’re just existing.

Do you think that your religious convictions had anything to do with your survival?

Yes, I was brought up to believe in God and that whatever He does is for our well being. We pray during difficult times and you know…I don’t have to tell you that sometimes we pray and we don’t get an answer right away. It’s very hard to get through a period like that. But we got through it. There is a verse in Psalms, Chapter 30 which I used to recite at the camps: “Though at night we may lie down crying, in the morning we will awake with song!” We lived through many nights, but we believed that morning would come. We believed that God wanted us to survive; to be witnesses; to tell the world how great our people were during the war. And I did tell the world.

What is your message to young people today?

I often speak to Jewish teenagers and I tell them about those girls and boys who risked their lives to save others; to give someone a piece of bread; or to give away their own piece of bread to someone who was hungrier than they were. I speak to those teenagers and I tell them what greatness they possess; how much goodness, beauty and love they have in them; how much of a will to help others and to bring goodness and justice into the world. I tell them they are just as great as the girls of the Zehnerschaft. I just pray that God won’t test them the way He tested us

How do you think you were tested?

Those people lived through the tortures and they still believed. They were greater than angels.Those Tillies, Tzilas, Rivkahs, those great, great women and men who risked their lives to save others. They were greater than angels. They passed all those tortures and didn’t become beasts like their tormentors. They lived through it and started a new life. They wanted to give, to live, to build a future for the Jewish people. They bore children and grandchildren. Isn’t that great? Aren’t they greater than angels? The angels did not see their parents being tortured. They did not see little children crying for their mothers. They did not see mothers running after the trucks taking their children to the gas chambers. The angels were not tortured…those people were! Those people lived through the tortures and they still believed. They were greater than angels.

What happened to your family?

My family had moved to Slomniki. A Polish neighbor informed the Gestapo that there was a Jewish family living in my house and they came and took my family one Friday while I was working in Krakow. They murdered my parents, my brother Shimshon and his wife Feiga, my brother Berish, my brother Avrum Chaim, my brother Asher, and my only sister Baila Malka. Their lives were brutally cut off in the death camp of Belzec in June 1942. Only my brother Mendek and I survived.

How do you manage to stay happy despite all the pain that you’ve experienced?

I stay happy by making other people happy. I believe that we were put here to make each other happy. Also, I went to a beautiful graduation here in Boro Park at the Beth Yaacov high school. I look and I see all those Jewish children, and I remember that after the war I could hardly walk, but I went from one barrack to another looking for one child. I did not find one child. Thank God, now we see so many wonderful Jewish children graduating, such great dorot (generations). That makes me very happy.

If you could erase all the traumatic memories of the Holocaust from your mind, would you do it?

No I wouldn’t because even in that university of torture I learned a lot. I grew from it. I don’t want to forget it. I want to teach my children about it. I want to tell my children and all the generations to come what is a man – how man can fall deep down into the pit of evil, and how man can raise himself to the loftiest heights and become greater than an angel. I want to tell the children what the “cultured” German nation did to us. I want to teach the children that they should be proud to be Jewish.

Thank you to Dina Reis for introducing me to Pearl Benisch and arranging our interview.

LOST Treasures of Tibet, Part II







Creating a Wall Painting:
Preserving History Inch by Inch
by Broughton Coburn


http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tibet/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tibet/resources.html

Lost Treasures of Tibet homepage

The summer of 2002 marked the fourth year of a five-year program to conserve and protect the Thubchen and Champa monasteries, artistic and religious centerpieces of the formerly forbidden kingdom of Mustang. For generations, these exquisite 15th-century Buddhist chapels or lhakhangs (literally "houses for divinities"), situated in Lo Monthang near Nepal's border with Tibet, have gone neglected, though the dry environment and the kingdom's very inaccessibility have provided some level of protection.

Circumstances are changing, however. Relatively recent environmental damage has threatened these monuments' 24-foot-high wall paintings, and the integrity of the structures themselves had been at risk. Without careful intervention, these monuments and their precious Tibetan Buddhist masterpieces would have been lost forever, a tragedy arguably akin to losing Michelangelo's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel.

A team of conservation experts—several Italians and a Guatemalan led by Englishman John Sanday—are now facing an enormous challenge. Centuries of soot and dust have obscured the serene faces of these images. More distressingly, over the past three decades, two of Thubchen monastery's soaring walls have suffered catastrophic "washdowns" as bursts of snowmelt, restrained by ice dams that formed on the roof, have drained into the building, scouring gullies and depositing streaks of mud across several wall paintings.

That's not all. Rising damp, a product of poor drainage outside the walls, infiltration, and stagnating water inside, had caused erosion from the floor up. Ground level outside many of the walls was found to rest well above the floor level of the prayer hall, partly as a result of accumulated debris from the collapse long ago (likely due to earthquake) of what might have been an upper story or clerestory.

Capillary action has drawn water from the wetter exterior of the structure toward the drier inside, saturating the earthen walls and their layers of clay. This moisture, along with soluble salts that recrystallize and expand as they dry, has collected behind the relatively impermeable paint layers and pushed against the painted surface from the inside out. The result: scaling and flaking of the preparatory paint layers, or renders, and in some cases their detachment from the walls altogether. Indeed, the conservators found sections of some paintings hanging like curtains.

The immediate objective of the ongoing conservation work has been to replace the ailing roofs and superstructure of these large chapels and to restore the underpinning—and brilliance—of the wall paintings. To do that, the conservators and their local trainees had to first stabilize the building and then rebuild the wall surfaces' traditional foundation layers of clay.


Capillary action has drawn water from the wetter exterior of the structure toward the drier inside, saturating the earthen walls and their layers of clay. This moisture, along with soluble salts that recrystallize and expand as they dry, has collected behind the relatively impermeable paint layers and pushed against the painted surface from the inside out. The result: scaling and flaking of the preparatory paint layers, or renders, and in some cases their detachment from the walls altogether. Indeed, the conservators found sections of some paintings hanging like curtains.

The immediate objective of the ongoing conservation work has been to replace the ailing roofs and superstructure of these large chapels and to restore the underpinning—and brilliance—of the wall paintings. To do that, the conservators and their local trainees had to first stabilize the building and then rebuild the wall surfaces' traditional foundation layers of clay.


Capillary action has drawn water from the wetter exterior of the structure toward the drier inside, saturating the earthen walls and their layers of clay. This moisture, along with soluble salts that recrystallize and expand as they dry, has collected behind the relatively impermeable paint layers and pushed against the painted surface from the inside out. The result: scaling and flaking of the preparatory paint layers, or renders, and in some cases their detachment from the walls altogether. Indeed, the conservators found sections of some paintings hanging like curtains.

The immediate objective of the ongoing conservation work has been to replace the ailing roofs and superstructure of these large chapels and to restore the underpinning—and brilliance—of the wall paintings. To do that, the conservators and their local trainees had to first stabilize the building and then rebuild the wall surfaces' traditional foundation layers of clay.

Capillary action has drawn water from the wetter exterior of the structure toward the drier inside, saturating the earthen walls and their layers of clay. This moisture, along with soluble salts that recrystallize and expand as they dry, has collected behind the relatively impermeable paint layers and pushed against the painted surface from the inside out. The result: scaling and flaking of the preparatory paint layers, or renders, and in some cases their detachment from the walls altogether. Indeed, the conservators found sections of some paintings hanging like curtains.

The immediate objective of the ongoing conservation work has been to replace the ailing roofs and superstructure of these large chapels and to restore the underpinning—and brilliance—of the wall paintings. To do that, the conservators and their local trainees had to first stabilize the building and then rebuild the wall surfaces' traditional foundation layers of clay.


Capillary action has drawn water from the wetter exterior of the structure toward the drier inside, saturating the earthen walls and their layers of clay. This moisture, along with soluble salts that recrystallize and expand as they dry, has collected behind the relatively impermeable paint layers and pushed against the painted surface from the inside out. The result: scaling and flaking of the preparatory paint layers, or renders, and in some cases their detachment from the walls altogether. Indeed, the conservators found sections of some paintings hanging like curtains.

The immediate objective of the ongoing conservation work has been to replace the ailing roofs and superstructure of these large chapels and to restore the underpinning—and brilliance—of the wall paintings. To do that, the conservators and their local trainees had to first stabilize the building and then rebuild the wall surfaces' traditional foundation layers of clay.

Capillary action has drawn water from the wetter exterior of the structure toward the drier inside, saturating the earthen walls and their layers of clay. This moisture, along with soluble salts that recrystallize and expand as they dry, has collected behind the relatively impermeable paint layers and pushed against the painted surface from the inside out. The result: scaling and flaking of the preparatory paint layers, or renders, and in some cases their detachment from the walls altogether. Indeed, the conservators found sections of some paintings hanging like curtains.

The immediate objective of the ongoing conservation work has been to replace the ailing roofs and superstructure of these large chapels and to restore the underpinning—and brilliance—of the wall paintings. To do that, the conservators and their local trainees had to first stabilize the building and then rebuild the wall surfaces' traditional foundation layers of clay.


Capillary action has drawn water from the wetter exterior of the structure toward the drier inside, saturating the earthen walls and their layers of clay. This moisture, along with soluble salts that recrystallize and expand as they dry, has collected behind the relatively impermeable paint layers and pushed against the painted surface from the inside out. The result: scaling and flaking of the preparatory paint layers, or renders, and in some cases their detachment from the walls altogether. Indeed, the conservators found sections of some paintings hanging like curtains.

The immediate objective of the ongoing conservation work has been to replace the ailing roofs and superstructure of these large chapels and to restore the underpinning—and brilliance—of the wall paintings. To do that, the conservators and their local trainees had to first stabilize the building and then rebuild the wall surfaces' traditional foundation layers of clay.


Made of mud, strong of stone

The original walls of Thubchen and Champa lhakhangs were made of rammed mud mortar (gyang in Tibetan), which workers tamped into wooden frames in a process similar to the laying of cement foundations, though the mud mortar is of thicker consistency and the work far more labor-intensive. Instead of massive foundation frames reaching the full height of the walls, medieval Lobas—as the people of Mustang are known—used sectional wood frames of about five feet in height, lifting and placing them atop successive layers as they dried.

The clay used for these walls (shi sa) was crude, containing wood fragments, pebbles, and other foreign material. The walls are stronger than one might expect given the nature of these materials, which gain part of their strength from their sheer mass. (In some cases they are more than three feet thick at the base.) Some later walls were constructed of large, sun-baked adobe bricks bonded by a finer clay mortar
Sanday's conservators did not intend to restore areas where painted images had flaked or eroded away, but in some cases they needed to rebuild and prepare sections of walls for painting or line drawing. The Raja, or King, of Mustang and the townspeople of Lo Monthang stressed that they wanted to worship entire, not incomplete divinities. It was agreed that, in order to meet international restoration standards while accommodating the wishes of the local people, some of the lost areas would be plastered and painted, to form linkages and continuity across small gaps. More expansive lost areas, often the lower portions, were completed only as line drawings without color fill, however, in order to restore the functional integrity of the paintings without attempting a "restoration."

Layer by layer

The techniques and materials the conservators now employ are virtually identical to those used over 500 years ago. (Thubchen was completed in 1472, Champa in 1448.) To begin flattening the surface of the wall, workers—relying on experience rather than precise measurements—mixed a blend of chopped straw, slightly sieved shi sa clay, and a slurry of cow dung (primarily as a binder). They then flung handfuls of this admixture onto the wall and worked it in with a smearing motion. When it had partially dried, they applied two or three additional, generally thinner, layers.

Even after all this work, the preparation of the wall had scarcely begun. In a report following the first year of restoration, chief conservator Rodolfo Lujan described the extraordinarily diverse ingredients needed to fashion the paintable surface:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tibet/painting.html

"The next (second) layer is composed of river sand and small pebbles mixed with a yellowish clay (pimbo) found at the west of Lo Monthang. The third layer consists of very fine sand (chema) mixed with pimbo and a greenish-brown clay known as shi pi pema, which comes from Jag Dha Mountain, north of Lo Monthang. A fourth layer is composed of shi pi pema and ghi sa, a light beige clay from Ahma Loun Mountain, southeast of the city. The final priming layer, on which artisans applied the preparatory drawing (in black paint) and the paint layers, consists of a mixture of khsa (an extremely fine white clay) with animal glue (ping) and local chang or beer. After drying, this was carefully polished."

Only after this multilayered surface was ready did the anonymous masters of medieval Mustang begin painting.

Renaissance artists in Europe sometimes relied on a technique, known as secco, that is roughly analagous to the Tibetan one.

Interestingly, when creating their own wall paintings, Renaissance artists in Europe sometimes relied on a technique, known as secco, that is roughly analagous to the above-described Tibetan one. Secco paintings, among them Leonardo's Last Supper, were painted onto a dry, polished, lime-based render (made from inorganic binders such as lime, mud, and gypsum) and a primer. Frescoes, on the other hand, including Michelangelo's in the Sistine Chapel, were painted onto moist ("fresh") lime-based render.

Origin of the pigments

The deep blues and greens as well as the paler shades of these colors come largely from azurite and malachite, basic carbonates of copper that generally occur together and sometimes blend within the same rock. Tibetan painting scholars David and Janice Jackson report that these minerals were largely mined in Nyemothang, in central Tibet. They were crushed into a sand, wrapped in small leather bags, and sold to painters by the Tibetan government.

The painters in turn prepared their azurite and malachite in a lengthy scrubbing and rinsing process, before grinding it in water. They did not have to do much grinding to obtain the much-desired rich blues and greens. Finer grinding resulted in paler shades, however, meaning that the artists could obtain full ranges of value by separating the particles on the basis of their size. In some cases, blue and sometimes green was mixed with varnish, making it brighter and more translucent.

The mineral cinnabar—or native mercury sulfide, the ore from which mercury is produced—was the source of the deep vermilion color, and it came mainly from Hunan province in China. Over 1,800 years ago, Chinese alchemists learned to separate and recombine the mercury and the sulfur, forming vermilion, which when powdered produced the desired deep red crystals. This was traded widely throughout Asia, and some of the cinnabar and vermilion used in Mustang and Tibet likely came from China by way of India. Many of the flower details in Thubchen's paintings were refinished in careful brushstrokes of red lac, a kind of natural shellac.

The Jacksons found that black and the inks used for writing and woodblock prints were carbon-based, generally soot or charcoal, while white came from chalk (calcium carbonate), lime (calcium oxide), or bone and bone ash. Orpiment yellow, which in the case of Mustang may have come largely from hot springs in eastern Tibet, is a trisulfide of arsenic, while the less intense yellow ochre, used primarily as an undercoat for gold, is a variety of the mineral limonite.

Using the hues

When commissioning a painting, patrons of religious art would generally budget for gold separately from the rest of the painting. Much of the gold was obtained, as it continues to be today, from Newar merchants in Lhasa, Tibet's capital. (The Newar ethnic group, renowned for its exquisite craftsmen, constitutes the original inhabitants of the Kathmandu valley; some Newar merchants settled in Tibet, where many intermarried with Tibetans.)

In Thubchen, the paintings were gilded with gold powder spread on with a brush and pen nib, especially for the flesh of the Buddha. Gold leaf, however, was used to highlight the raised areas, which were created a pastiglia for the deities' jewelry and other ornamentation. In addition to gold's intense, reflective luster and its tendency to remain untarnished, artists found it easy to work with.

symbolism and the value of ayurvedic medicine

Each color also contains inherent symbolism, which is especially meaningful in the creation of tantric mandalas, the circular representations of the universe done in paint or sand:

Blue/black = wrath, pollution
Red = love, attachment, power
Yellow = ascendance, riches
White = peace, purity

Perhaps surprisingly, many of the minerals from which pigments are derived had medicinal value in the Tibetan system of ayurvedic medicine.

Despite the existence of modern materials and techniques that might be suitable for rebuilding and restoring ancient Tibetan monuments, there are several reasons why conservators study and use methods that were employed centuries ago. First, the original materials are locally available, often from their original sources; artists can collect clays and soils from the same sites their forbears gathered them from over half a millenium ago. Second, the early methods are not necessarily inferior to their modern substitutes, as evidenced by their longevity. Finally, some of the traditional wall-building, plastering, and painting techniques, which have been perfected over countless generations, are still in use today. So local artisans can be employed with some confidence in the resulting quality, though the relearning curve has been steep.

Eleventh-hour aid

These conservation efforts—funded by the American Himalayan Foundation and overseen by Nepal's King Mahendra Trust for Nature Conservation and the Annapurna Conservation Area Project—are occurring none too soon. Ever since Nepalese authorities opened Mustang to tourism in 1992, Lobas have been emigrating in increasing numbers to Kathmandu and the cities of south Asia in search of their fortunes. Even those who are religiously inclined now seek higher Buddhist instruction in Kathmandu and India. They are leaving behind something of a cultural and economic vacuum.


Lobas now compete for the chance to become conservation trainees.


In Lo Monthang, when Sanday and Lujan originally proposed hiring local people to assist them in the conservation and cleaning work, they were met with skepticism and apathy, despite the Raja's endorsement of their efforts. But the magic of time and dedication and a few modern techniques have brought renewed glory to Thubchen monastery, and with it the attention, respect, and revived faith of the town's citizens. Women's groups now use the Thubchen chapel for their meetings, townspeople proudly escort tourists through the building, and even the abbot of the town's newer monastery is keen to rededicate Thubchen as an active religious center.

Most impressively, local Lobas now compete for the chance to become conservation trainees, and nearly as many women as men have joined the ranks. Indeed, the most rewarding result of this conservation project may be the trained and motivated residents. They now have many of the skills needed to begin replicating this work elsewhere in Mustang and across the southern slopes of the Nepal Himalaya, the native architecture of which has been neglected for decades and in some cases centuries. A revitalization of indigenous traditions, religious belief, and community pride has been an unexpected side effect of this heart-warming project on the roof of the world.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tibet/painting.html
Jackson, David P. and Jackson, Janice A., Tibetan Thangka Painting: Methods and Materials. New York: Snow Lion Publications, 1984.

Sanday, John, "The Gateway to Nirvana: Conserving the Temples of Mustang," Orientations, October 1999.


Deciphering Buddha Imagery
By Rick Groleau
Posted 02.18.03
NOVA
Whether in the form of a wall painting, statue, or some other religious artifact, an image of Buddha is meant to serve as an inspiration to Buddhists and as a way to honor and remember Shakyamuni, the founder of Buddhism (as well as other Buddhas). But there are many depictions in Buddhist art that resemble—yet aren’t—“The Enlightened One.” This interactive reveals common traits that will help you to recognize an image of the Buddha and to understand the meanings of the five most common hand gestures—or mudras—used in Buddhist art
Note interactive slides demonstratng the mudras or hand gestures:
The ushnisha -hair---expanded wisdom
Ears give up attachment to material objects
Eyes dot wisdom eye
Neck beauty of the conch shell
The sacred grid or tigse considered sacred structure for the image guidelines artist must follow
Bhumisparsha asked earth goddess Sthavara to bear witness
Dharmachakra wheel of dharma
Varada chaity and compassion supreme giving
Dhyana 3 jewels of Buddhism
Abhaya fearlessness peace and protection

TV Program Description
Original PBS Broadcast Date: February 18, 2003



Lost Treasures of Tibet homepage

Before Leonardo da Vinci painted "The Last Supper," Tibetan craftsmen were creating stunning artistry of their deities in the remote Himalayan kingdom of Mustang. In "Lost Treasures of Tibet," NOVA goes behind the scenes with the first conservation team from the West, as it undertakes the painstaking restoration of these ancient masterpieces and the beautiful monasteries that house them.

Located in present-day Nepal, Mustang contains some of the last remaining relics of an almost vanished world of ancient Buddhist culture. Across the border in Tibet, Chinese occupiers have destroyed thousands of monasteries since taking control of the country in 1950. Therefore, the survival of Mustang's monasteries or gompas is more important than ever. But preservation is extremely difficult because of the centuries of neglect, weather, and earthquakes that have brought many buildings to the brink of collapse. Inside, their exquisite murals are in a near-ruined state.

In the course of their restoration work, conservators from the West come face-to-face with a thorny problem of culture clash: local people want missing sections of the murals completed. Westerners are aghast at the idea, but their hosts are equally shocked at the thought of worshiping unfinished deities.

The program follows the struggle of an international team headed by British conservationist John Sanday to restore the greatest gompa of all—Thubchen, the royal monastery in Mustang's capital of Lo Monthang. The first order of business is fixing Thubchen's roof—no small feat since 200 tons of dirt have been piled on its flat surface over the centuries to seal out leaks. To bear that much weight, the hidden ceiling beams must be more than two feet thick, an apparent impossibility considering that Mustang is virtually treeless. Sanday solves this riddle when his team excavates down to the beams and discovers an elaborate jigsaw puzzle of construction that uses interlocking small timbers to create a lightweight, load-bearing structure.

Ancient Tibetan craftsmen were equally inventive in engineering an ideal wall surface for their murals (see Creating a Wall Painting). Six layers of plaster were applied to the walls, starting with a coarse grain and becoming progressively finer. The same method was used for secco (dry plaster) murals in Europe during the Renaissance, although there is no evidence that Tibetans and Europeans exchanged information on the technique.

As for Thubchen's paintings, they are badly obscured by eons of butterlamp soot, animal glues, and abrasions from yak tail dusters. To deal with the disfigurement, Sanday calls in Rodolfo Lujan from Italy, one of Europe's premier experts in art restoration.

After painstaking treatment to stabilize the plaster, which is badly flaking, Lujan and his assistants start removing the grime. What emerges is startling to behold: brilliantly colored scenes depicting the life of the Buddha (see Before and After). The artists have left no signatures, but Lujan places them in a class with the Italian Renaissance masters. "Maybe the quality is even better than ... a Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael," he marvels. Which makes it all the more difficult when he is asked to take his own brush in hand to complete the missing sections of these priceless masterpieces.

Before and After
by Lexi Krock



Lost Treasures of Tibet homepage

When restoration work began in Lo Monthang's Thubchen monastery in 2001, the once-vivid colors of its wall paintings appeared dull and grimy, trapped behind 500 years of smoke, soot, and grease from butter lamps. Portions of the paintings had faded from depradations caused by snowmelt leaking into the building, and in places where the underlying plaster had become detached from the walls, large pieces of these medieval masterpieces hung precariously off the walls.


But the restoration team worked wonders, returning Thubchen's surviving wall paintings to remarkably close approximations of their original magnificence.


Before and After
The restoration



Lost Treasures of Tibet homepage

In order repair the paintings, head conservator Rodolfo Lujan and his team began a painstaking process. First, they cleaned the paintings with a special solvent. Made of ethyl alcohol and powdered ammonium bicarbonate, the solvent dissolves dirt and grease. The restorers were careful to dab the cleaning solution onto the paintings through a thin barrier of tissue paper, a method that ensures only the painting's surface dirt—and not its pigments, made of semiprecious stone—comes off. (The same method was used to clean Michelangelo's ceiling frescoes in the Sistine Chapel.)

Once the paintings were clean, the team began the next step: securing loose pieces of plaster to the monastery's mud walls. Using a plaster made from mud, they filled up the gap between the detached painted plaster suface and the wall behind. They then used a syringe-like applicator to inject a powerful adhesive behind the plaster, thus securing the painted plaster layers to the newly thickened wall.

The final step in restoration involved touching up areas of the paintings where color was missing due to extreme damage. To preserve the integrity of the original paintings, Lujan's team used washable watercolor paints in crosshatched strokes to complete both tiny and large sections of the paintings. This way, future conservators could readily distinguish new sections from original and easily remove them if necessary. Lujan and his crew left other paintings restored but not touched up.

The ongoing restoration of the paintings in Thubchen, along with the structural renovations to the monastery's roof and beams, should help ensure that these treasures will remain intact for another 500 years.

Lost Treasures of Tibet


Program Overview





Back to Teachers Home


Lost Treasures of Tibet


Viewing Ideas




Before Watching

Assign groups to research the basic tenets of Buddhism such as: Who was Buddha? What do Buddhists believe? How do Buddhists view nature? Where is Buddhism practiced today? By how many people? Have students record their findings. Conclusions may vary as Buddhism is extremely complex and many interpretations of Buddhism exist. Be sensitive to students who may practice Buddhism. As they watch, organize students into groups and have each group take notes about different areas of Buddhism revealed in their initial research.

After Watching

Have students combine what they learned in the program with their research and report their final notes about Buddhism. Did anything in the program change or add to what they learned in their earlier research? What, if any, further questions do they have?

An anthropologist is a scientist who studies human beings both in the past and in the present. Ask students to come up with reasons that anthropologists would be interested in the religion or religious art of a society. What might be learned from studying a society's religion?

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Lost Treasures of Tibet


Classroom Activity

Materials Procedure Activity Answer Links & Books Standards




Objective
To create a mandala-style piece of art.


copy of the "Designing a Mandala" student handout (PDF or HTML)
paper
colored pencils

Anthropologists and sociologists study cultural art and religion partly because they reflect other aspects of a society. One of the religious and artistic expressions important to Buddhists in Lo Monthang is the mandala. The circle represents the cosmos and is used as a guide to meditation. Tell students they will be creating their own mandala, and that, like a traditional mandala, it should have symbolic meaning of their own choosing.

Provide a copy of the "Designing a Mandala" student handout to each student. Review with students the meaning of some of the components represented in the Chenrezig mandala shown on their student handouts.

Have students create their mandalas. Tell them that symmetry is an essential quality of mandalas, with each mandala built on a series of concentric circles. Ask them to consider and choose angles and geometric shapes that will create symmetry in their mandalas.

After students have determined some shapes, have them create their symbol systems. As they do so, have students think about what is important to them, including people, places, objects, and beliefs. Have students create a chart describing what each symbol means, including colors and their meanings.

Once the mandalas are created, have students write short poems or essays explaining what their mandalas symbolize. Then organize the class into four groups. Have each group display its mandala pictures together in one area, putting a number on each picture. Then have members put letters on their descriptions of the mandalas and display the descriptions with the drawings (but not matched up).

Once all groups are done, assign groups to different stations. Have each group member first look at each mandala and try to interpret its meaning and then read the descriptions and match them up with the corresponding mandalas.

Conclude by discussing the different ideas that students' mandalas symbolize. How close were students' original interpretations of each others' mandalas to the actual descriptions?

As an extension, have students compare their mandalas to real ones. For photos of Tibetan mandalas, visit the Himalayan Art Web site at: www.himalayanart.org/search/set.cfm?setID=91


Tibetan monks may spend weeks creating an intricate sand mandala, only to destroy it within seconds to symbolize the spirit of impermanence and non-attachment to the material world—that everything is in the process of passing away and returning. Sand mandalas are usually gathered in a jar, blessed, and poured into a river or stream where the water disperses the healing energies of the sand.

Each mandala is designed to invite people to greater awareness of various aspects of Buddhist teachings and desirable qualities, such as compassion, wisdom, or strength. Some of the colors used in a Chenrezig mandala, which represents compassion, include white, green, blue, yellow, and red. A mandala usually contains three levels: The outermost level represents the world in its divine form, the inner level depicts a map toward enlightenment, and a secret level represents the perfect balance between body and mind. Every aspect of a mandala has meaning, from the shapes and symbols chosen to the colors used.

Students' mandalas may show a great variety of forms, symbols, and colors—they should reflect some consciousness of the use of shapes and of symbols with meaning to the student artist. There is no right way to design or interpret a mandala.


Book

Jackson, David, and Janice Jackson. Tibetan Thangka Painting: Methods and Materials. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications, 1984.
Describes the sacred art of Tibetan scroll painting, from composition to application.

Articles

Day, Nicholas. "The World in a Grain of Sand." Washington Post, August 5, 1998, page C1.
Describes the process that Tibetan monks use to build and destroy a five-foot mandala made of millions of grains of crushed, vegetable-dyed marble sand.

Shacochis, Bob. "Kingdoms in the Air." Outside, October 2002, page 158.
Describes the Mustang region, including life in Lo Monthang.

Web Sites

NOVA's Web Site—Lost Treasures of Tibet
www.pbs.org/nova/tibet/
Provides program-related articles, interviews, interactive activities, and resources.

The Mandala Project
www.mandalaproject.org
Invites the submission of mandalas to an online gallery and discusses the importance of the mandala in different religious traditions.

A New Ceiling for the Roof of the World
www.asianart.com/ahf/index.html
Discusses the restoration of the 15th-century Thubchen Gompa monastery in Mustang.

The Mandala of Chenrezig
www.webster.edu/depts/artsci/religion/mandala/index.html
Presents Webster University's Mandala of Chenrezig and includes information about the Buddhist religion and a link to the World Wide Web Virtual Library for Buddhist studies Web sites.

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Lost Treasures of Tibet


Ideas from Teachers




(Gr. 3)
Having recently made the trek to Mustang, I decided to start a cultural awareness campaign among my students about their counterparts in the Land of Lo.

Students will first learn about the non-mechanized lifestyle these children experience and what that would mean to us here in the United States (lack of electricity, no cars or bicycles, etc.). The children will draw pictures of things they would be without (video games, etc.).

Then, students will watch parts of the NOVA "Lost Treasures of Tibet" program to learn about the great monastaries being restored and how this restoration is leading to a renewal in art, civic pride, religion, and family. Students will explore projects here in the United States that have given us the same kinds of feelings (i.e., the revitalization of urban downtowns in Philadelphia or Los Angeles; the rebuilding of structures destroyed by fire or earthquake; or even the simple repair of a child's favorite toy, blanket, or stuffed animal).

Each day of the week will be dedicated to discussing a custom, legend, tradition, muscial instrument, or food.

At the culmination of this unit, each child will write a short fictional story using the ideas, customs, foods, animals, religion, or images as their inspiration. Students will provide an illustration to serve as a book cover or inside drawing to accompany their story.

Sent in by
Debra Lucero Austin
Marigold Elementary School
Chico, CA
deblucero@sbcglobal.net



(Gr. 9)
Objective
To provide students with guided questions for viewing the video.

Materials

NOVA's "Lost Treasures of Tibet" program
student handout with questions
Procedure

What was the purpose of the sand art? What does it signify?

Most of the people in Mustang are of what ethnicity? But what country do they belong to?

On the road to Lo Manthang, what do the following represent?

Rocks in the wall?
The colors used in the stripes?
The stripes themselves?
How many Buddhists are there in the world today?

In the old days, how did Tibetan families contribute to the monasteries?

Why did many leave Tibet in the 1950s?

Why is Mustang such an important place for Buddhists?

Why do Buddhists take a pilgrimage to the cave on the road to Lo Manthang?

How do Buddhists use flags?

What do the colors of the prayer flags mean?

How was Lo Manthang wealthy in its era, 500 years ago?

What do monasteries do for society?

How are the wall paintings in the old monastery, Thubchen, viewed by Buddhists?

What reaction did the locals of Lo Manthang have on the renovation of the
temple?

What ancient ingredients did the renovators use to reconstruct the temple?

What three skills were the Newar masters at?

Why wouldn't the renovators use modern machines and ingredients that would obviously make it easier and faster to fix the temple?

What did the infrared video reveal about the wall paintings?

What materials were the paints made out of and how were they transformed?

Why was it not the custom for the painters to sign their names to their works in Tibetan culture?

What do the images in the temple depict about the Buddha and his teachings?

Why does the King of Mustang think it is important for the conservationists to fill in the cracks and holes?

How does this conflict with the beliefs of the conservationists?

What does a mandela represent?

How is the transportation of Lo Manthang being transformed?

How will this affect the ancient paintings and structures in the town?

How has the renovation led to a revival of the Thubchen temple?

If the belief of Buddhist thinking is impermanence, why do you think the King and people of Mustang pushed for the renovation of the temple? What other belief is held by the Buddhists to support the rebuilding?


Sent in by
Anna Amsler
Emerson Junior High School
Davis, CA



(Gr. 9-12)
Objective
To get students to think critically and challenge common assumptions about Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism.

To challenge stereotypes about cultures unfamiliar to us.

To expand awareness of the range of factors that help constitute a cultural identity; to research, organize, and present information about everyday life in an unfamiliar culture.

To create an imaginative firsthand account of life in an unfamiliar culture.

Materials

Video: NOVA's "The Lost Treasures of Tibet"
Excerpts from "The Struggle for Modern Tibet—Autobiography of Tashi Tsering" by Goldstein, Siebenschuh and Tsering
Student's Journals
Procedure
In the Nova video, we find that Mustang is actually in current-day Nepal, at least by political boundaries. Though it is a part of Nepal, Mustang falls within the ethnic realm of Tibet. While Nepal is not in the People's Republic of China, it is sandwiched between India and China.

Begin by asking students questions about their impressions of Tibet and what it means to them. Ask other questions, such as:

"Have you ever seen a bumper sticker that says, 'Free Tibet'? What does that mean to you?"

"Have you heard of the Dalai Lama? Who is he? What does he represent?"

After having a brief discussion on their ideas, view the NOVA episode, "Lost Treasures of Tibet." Following the program, discuss the following ideas with students:

"What are the main differences between the way the Western artists who worked on the art restoration view their job, and that of the local people?"

"Who were the original artisans?" (They were likely Newaris from the Kathmandu area of Nepal.)

"How does the lama from Dharamsala fit into to this equation? Why did they have no local Lama? What is the role of the local king (raja) in the situation?"

We know that in Tibet, many of the monasteries were destroyed on purpose, and the monks and lamas were forced into a secular life, particularly during the Cultural Revolution. However, here in Mustang there was no similar external force to destroy the monastery. "Why are there no monks or Lamas to maintain this monastery?"

In Tibet, prior to the arrival of the People's Liberation Army of China, the lamas, monks, and about 200 aristocratic families controlled Tibet's wealth and power. Villagers paid taxes and gave tribute to support them, and gave yaks, butter and other gifts for blessings or "merit." There were no public schools, and only the aristocracy, monks, and lamas could ever hope to learn to read and write their own language. Today even common Tibetans can go to school. "When you see 'Free Tibet' as a bumper sticker, do you think the people are aware of the inequalities that existed in traditional Tibet? How has the Tibetan Buddhism been viewed by the West?"

Have students read "The Struggle for Modern Tibet: The Autobiography of Tashi Tsering." Note: This book has a few passages that may not be suitable for 9th and 10th graders, it may be more appropriate for 11th and 12th grade students. The book is one man's journey from a poor village to being a dancer for the Dalai Lama to being a student to being a political prisoner and more. This will give students a more concrete reality of the issues surrounding Tibet. Note: The Tibetan footage in the NOVA video comes from a heavily biased film called "Compassion in Exile," directed by Mickey Lemle, and gives students/viewers no context for the violent scenes. As reprehensible as they are, this does not help viewers apply critical thinking skills. [Editor's note: Liesl Clark, the producer of the NOVA program, responds: "We felt that the context -- the Chinese cultural revolution -- was so broad that it included specific events like those shown in the film, the beating of the monks and nuns by Chinese police and footage of destroyed monasteries by the Chinese. These are well known clips that have been distributed by the International Campaign for Tibet for use in documentaries like ours that only begin to touch on the atrocities."]

Assessment


Argument
Comparison of primary and secondary sources
Research
Classroom Tips
This may be used for Social Studies or Literature/critical thinking lessons.

Sent in by
Rex Michael Dillon
Silver Creek High School
San Jose, CA





NOVA travels to the Mustang region in Nepal where a small group of Westerners are working with local townspeople to preserve murals on monastery walls.

The program:

explores the village of Lo Monthang where the way of life has remained the same for the past 500 years.

discusses Mustang's importance as a last stronghold of Tibetan culture, which was mostly destroyed when China invaded Tibet in the 1950s.

focuses on the preservation of paintings on the walls of a monastery in Lo Monthang.

explores the dynamics between Western preservationists and the citizens of Lo Monthang.

examines the importance of Buddhism in Tibetan culture and the key role the monasteries play in town politics and education.

documents techniques used by visiting specialists to preserve the monasteries and their paintings.

shows the technology used by locals to repair the monasteries.

compares the Renaissance periods that took place simultaneously, yet independently of one another, in Europe and Tibet.


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Lost Treasures of Tibet


Related NOVA Resources




The following resources from the companion Web site accompany this program:

Before and After
Compare nine paintings in Lo Monthang's Thubchen monastery before and after restoration. (Flash plug-in required.) (Grades 3-5, 6-8, 9-12)

Creating a Wall Painting
Read about the steps involved in restoring the 15th-century Thubchen and Champa monastery murals. (Grades 9-12)

Tour Mustang
Take a look at the people, villages, and vistas of Mustang in this photo tour. (Grades 3-5, 6-8, 9-12)

Deciphering Buddha Imagery
Learn about some of the familiar traits found in the Buddha image, as well as the meanings of the five most common hand gestures, in this interactive feature. (Flash plug-in required; non-Flash version available.) (Grades 6-8, 9-12)

Plus:

Resources

Program Transcript
Complete narration for the TV program.